Pay-TV Operators Must Adopt a Retail Mentality, Motorola Home CTO Says
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Pay-TV providers need to “become the preferred store that consumers go to to get their video service,” said Chief Technology Officer Dave Grubb of Motorola’s Moto Home division told a set-top box conference Wednesday. As the TV and set-top become more capable of running multiple applications, providers need to offer a one-stop shop where customers can go for all their video needs, he said. “Consumers will prefer this.” They aren’t “big fans of piece-building their service solutions and getting a little bit from here and a little bit from there,” said Grubb.
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As retailers, pay-TV operators need to do a better job of marketing their goods, Grubb said. “When you go to a VOD catalog, you just see a big pile of stuff,” he said: “There’s a real opportunity here to move to more of a retail-oriented model” where certain shows or movies are promoted, bundled together and recommended.
As has happened with mobile communications, TV service has become increasingly separate from the network and devices that distribute and display it, Grubb said. Cellphones have become computers with one application of many devoted to phone calling, he said. “TV service is indeed becoming an app.” But it’s not clear that consumers want their TVs and set-tops to become a multifunction application platform, he said.
To accommodate the divergent goals of offering a deep catalog of video services with a simple on-TV user interface, providers may have to separate video discovery from consumption, he said. Netflix already does this, as users can add movies to their queue the day they're released in theaters, and then wait months for a DVD to arrive in the mail and watch it, he said. “How much of the experience can we peel off and do on other devices?"
On-screen search is a “last-resort” technology for TV, Grubb said. “I tell our engineers that when a consumer pulls up search, that means we've failed.” It’s a necessary component as a backstop, but not something that should be featured in a user-interface, he said. That’s because it doesn’t conform to the passive way most people watch TV, he said. Figuring out the right configuration for remote controls is one of the hardest questions to answer, he said. Remote control development “needs to be done in concert with the user-experience,” Grubb said. There will be diversity in the area of remotes, because not everyone uses them in the same way, he said. “I don’t think anyone has really cracked the code there yet."
The FCC’s AllVid device proceeding could be successful if set up in a way that allows innovation to continue, Grubb said. Earlier FCC mandates around set-tops failed because the solutions were too encumbered with specific mandates and took too long to implement, he said. “By the time you're done, it’s obsolete.” Grubb said that for the AllVid device “maybe there is a path forward if there’s a way to structure something that recognizes that, and supports innovation instead of trying to lock down a set of requirements that really stamp out innovation.”