Connected TV Summit 2011

Videonet’s second annual Connected TV Summit took place in London this week. Attended by over 360 delegates, with representatives from across the connected TV delivery chain, it proved to be a strong industry event.

While there was very little talk of 3D TV, the leading TV manufacturers arhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife clearly committed to increasing their connected TV offerings. According to Informa’s Senior Analyst, Giles Cottie the main driver for this is simply to keep up with the competition.

As you’d expect, Video-on-Demand remains key, as viewers enjoy the freedom of watching what they want, when they want. Ian Mecklenburgh from Virgin Media stressed that TV still remains the most important aspect of the connected TV, he also told delegates that if on-demand was a channel it would be its third most popular.

We also saw an increasing number of services for companion devices such as the iPhone and iPad as the connected home takes shape. NDS, Philips, Samsung and Sky were all talking about new projects along with Siemens showing a slick new demo using a cloud based service.

Edd Uzzell from Sony had some interesting points about connected devices, notably that demonstrating their full capabilities continues to be a challenge as the majority of retailers aren’t even ‘connected’, making it impossible to showcase the full range of benefits to consumers. As we’ve discussed on this blog before we mustn’t forget the consumer in all of this, retailers and device manufacturers need to help consumers understand how they can make the most of these new services, so they don’t get left behind in these exciting developments.