Interactive Program Guides To Go "New Media"
New Market dBrief from The Diffusion Group Predicts that Today's TV-Based Interactive Program Guide
Will Soon Give Way to Trans-platform "Personal Entertainment Guide"
January 10, 2006 (Dallas, Texas) - According to new white paper from The Diffusion Group, today's relatively static TV search guide - one tethered to a set-top box and TV - will soon be replaced by a more dynamic, personalized entertainment guide that will serve not only the TV viewing experience, but Internet and mobile video consumption as well. The number of consumers using a "personal entertainment guide" or PEG will surge to almost 800 million and create more than $1.4 in global licensing revenue by 2010.
"Given the pending shift by both viewers and content providers away from predetermined and static TV subscriptions and toward time-and place-shifting content consumption, the IPG must respond in kind," said Colin Dixon, author of the white paper and senior analyst with The Diffusion Group. "What will emerge is a 'personal entertainment guide' or PEG that capitalizes on many of the techniques pioneered on the web in the areas of search, behavior prediction, and distributed computing and thus be more attuned to the viewer's preferences and capable of spanning a multitude of consumer devices, both stationary and portable."
Increasingly, video content owners are looking to leverage both traditional and "new media" conduits such as broadband and high-speed cellular networks to push their content to consumers regardless of time or location. Last week's Consumer Electronics Show provided ample evidence of these new strategies as "old-school" content purveyors announced partnerships with network operators, silicon and software players, and search giants.
"As these initial efforts begin to bare fruit, the importance of a consistent user interface and content guide will become increasingly important," said Dixon. "Given how competitive these markets will be, the importance of a superior program guide cannot be underestimated. A poor or inflexible interface leads directly to unhappy viewers, falling average revenue per unit (ARPU), and increased churn."
This Market dBrief,™ The IPG Goes New Media, is available for free download at TDG's website. The Market dBrief™ provides a summary and overview of TDG's latest "new media" report, Program Guides at the Crossroad: The IPG Gets Personal, which offers a more extensive examination of the various technological and economic trends underlying the move to PEGs (e.g. search, end-user behavior, multi-platform distribution); the impact of PEGs on video advertising; the importance of metadata in the PEG environment; profiles of leading EPG and emerging PEG players; global forecasts for broadband-enabled versus traditional set-top box deployments; and global forecasts for PEG licenses.
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