Tumbled Logic

#FutureMedia

I’m not at FutureMedia, but I’ve been watching the tweetstream fly past.

Some interesting statements which have gone by:

• Erik Huggers: “If Canvas doesn’t happen there’ll be all the extra costs of reformatting content for each different platform.” — @C21Media
• BBC’s Erik Huggers: “PS3 community almost as big as Mac.” — @C21Media
• Valuable insight on why meta data is key for the ‘discoverability’ of VOD content from OnTV’s Colin Moorcraft @ #FutureMedia — @ianjamesdavies
• Sky’s Griff Parry says Sky is becoming platform agnostic with Sky Player, aiming to attract users over IP . — @Jenky

Some takeaway points from this:

1. Erik Huggers implies that the rest of the world in general, and the Internet technical community in particular, is incapable of formulating open standards and driving their adoption. Perhaps it’s the fact that IETF and W3C standards tend not to have strings and arduous licensing conditions attached?
2. People like watching TV on their TVs—as iPlayer gets better at targeting the consoles (and the consoles become more capable), it’d be surprising if their share didn’t become significant. Additionally, Flash’s performance on the Mac is awful, which will dissuades people from using iPlayer (at least, directly).
3. Metadata is quite obviously the key to VoD discoverability. I’m not entirely convinced it’s valuable insight to state the obvious: without metadata, discoverability is a non-starter. It does highlight why no-strings-attached, agnostic, open standards for such things are critical in driving forward the industry.
4. I think Griff Parry (and I doubt he’s alone) might be confusing “platform” and “medium”, and even “multi-platform” and “platform-agnostic”. Just because something’s got multiple delivery channels, it doesn’t automatically follow that it’s platform-agnostic.