It’s easy to knock AT&T as a large, slow corporation, but listening to De La Vega and seeing some of the things coming out of AT&T Labs, you’d almost think, “by golly, AT&T gets it!”
If AT&T accomplishes ever a portion of what it’s setting out to do, IPTV can be a very important piece of the puzzle.
IPTV sets out to expand choice of content to consumers - from both established players and niche creators - to really become on demand.
Like YouTube’s brass, De La Vega sees torso content - the content between UGC and studios/network content - as the major opportunity online. But due to licensing challenges, they also see this as the main problem to overcome, before it becomes the next billion dollar business. I totally agree here, being a producer of torso content ourselves.
Alas, the company is looking to offer its 120M consumers content across all platforms: web, TV, mobile; and needs licensing deals to cover rights across these platforms.
He also stressed, however, that content needs to be high def and high quality, “UGC does not cut it” was the main theme.
AT&T, and all telcos in fact, are slow and deep-layered, but listening to De la Vega – a Cuban native – it sounds like AT&T is looking for partnerships, particularly with content owners: “new TV is not something we can do all alone.”
“We call it the new AT&T, or AT&T 2.0.” which naturally got some chuckles from the audience, yeah, I’d drop that that last part.
Of note for AT&T consumers, expect expanding 3G coverage by next year, in 2008.
More to come.
Tags: ATT, Video, Wireless|
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Nov 14th
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November 25th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
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