Managing Metadata Key to New Set Top Box Services
New Market dBrief™ from The Diffusion Group Explores Issues
in Leveraging Metadata to Monetize Advanced Networks
May 19, 2006 (Dallas, Texas) - A Market dBrief™ from The Diffusion Group, a research consultancy focusing on the new media markets, finds that the set-top box (STB) may become a major choke point in delivering new digital services to the home. Satellite, Telco and Cable Operators are seeking to deliver services such as Video-on-Demand, Personal Video Recording, and Voice over IP over newly upgraded networks. These services will come together at the set-top box, which is not able to properly manage metadata to make the user experience as simple and clean as possible.
"Operators face enormous pressure to leverage these high-bandwidth architectures to deliver digital services," writes Colin Dixon, IP Media Practice Manager at The Diffusion Group. "Consumers will demand delivery of these services in an easy-to-use and intuitive manner - a significant challenge that includes managing disparate data sources on the set-top box. At the most basic level, operators must master metadata to increase adoption."
Mastering the Metadata Menace: How Metadata Mismanagement is Slowing the Delivery of Digital Services to the Set-Top Box finds that the consequences of the fragmented and inefficient management of application metadata are profound for both operators and developers, a situation that will only get worse as more and more applications are added to the mix. For example, the data available for a STB's Interactive Program Guide resides in a different format for the Personal Video Recorder, the Video On Demand service, and live Broadcast Streams. The fact that these data streams aren't integrated means that the consumer may have to perform three different searches to find one program.
TDG's Market dBrief,™ Mastering the Metadata Menace: How Metadata Mismanagement is Slowing the Delivery of Digital Services to the Set-Top Box, offers an examination of the various trends and impacts to the operator, the STB manufacturer, middleware provider, and even the CE industry. This free paper is available on TDG's website.
ShareThis