Introduction, József Mlinarics

A brief introduction on the ACTen project is given to the members of the BRT and to the audience by J. Mlinarics, explaining the objectives and the possible outcomes. Introducing the agenda of the BRT - 12 and compereing the introductory presentation

Introductory presentation, Gábor Magyar

• Create once, publish everywhere
• Cross media publishing
• Content management hype cycle
• Content-based automatic content indexing
• Broadband business models and cases

Start of the BRT

J. Mlinarics introduces the discussion in general, then a short self presentation of the experts is given. All the relevant topics of the BRT discussion are represented by the invited experts from various business and non-profit organisations as well as from the public administration, thus publishing (online), cable TV, telecommunications.

Discussion topic 1.

Q.: J. Mlinarics -  Who did already participate in R&D programmes in the field of broadband content development and provision, and if not, why?

Z. Szombathy – explains, that the local cable TV company has not participated in any projects so far, they did not meet any of the opportunities, mainly due to lack of information, everyday work gives enough work-load for the company, and also, own financial resources are limited for any participation..

 
G. Ganczer – the company has not participated in any projects, refers to the Swiss HQ of the parent company.

F. Hámori – they did not participate in any of explicitly R&D type of EU projects. however they were a partner in a Phare project in the field of content management, but  that program was also not directly of R&D type.

P. Horváth – introduces the one of the largest national programmes on managing digital content, called National Digital Archive (NDA). The overall aim is to collect, digitize and preserve content of public utility and of national interest. The program is also focusing on the issues of online publishing, content creation and management. This programme is a very important milestone in speeding up the process of production content in the public domain. They also focus on all time top priority topics as the national broadband strategy and fund raising for the financial contribution to EU projects.

J. Mlinarics – mentions that the government will locate a sum of 10-15 billion HUF in the coming year for content development within the framework of the National Development Plan. The main objective is to strengthen the relationship and co-operation among the public and the private sector, NGOs, and the public administration.

P. Eckhardt – they participate in an prequalifying application within the eContent programme. The proposed project is called Eurokids, which is a community-bulding virtual society initiative. They also have a local ICT R&D project application for creating a multimedia platform for elearning type of content.

L. Fekete – mentioning (digital) mobile telephony, but not only on European level. Also, they highly focus on very specific applications, or solutions of special problems, for which, there is no real match on the global market yet. Such as Hungarian language speech recognition tools and text-to-speach utilities. They regularly take part in various coproductions and joint projects with other European mobile operators through the main shareholder of the company. Otherwise, they haven't frequently participated in EU project consortia until now.

Gy. Ágoston – says, that the national TV is in a special position as it is an active member of the European Broadcasting Union, where they discuss among 70 participants the relevant topics of technical, social and psychological aspects of content and broadcasting. The Hungarian TV regularly joins in many of the research activities and projects of the union. However, they seldom participate in EU programmes as most of its equivalent exist within the union, moreover, with almost the same group of experts as in the EU programmes. Main topics are content creation, ICT based production chain and workflow. This is a major paradigm change. There is a strong focus on the management of archives.

G. Magyar – explains that the Budapest University of Technology participates in hundreds of projects, and the department itself partners in a great number of joint efforts as well. There is a growing pull from the industry research, making obvious the necessity of the participation of the academic sector, especially in outsourcing those activities.

J. Mlinarics – mentions the importance of helping and advancing the economical competitiveness. There is an initiative to establish research centres to support SME's business and to satisfy their research and development needs.

Participant – Annotates the National Development Plan, and the financial resources to it. One ot those resources was the TEN-Telecom, which is now eTEN. Those resources finance and especially support those applications and services which are the subject of this recent BRT discussion. He also mentions that the accession countries are in the main focus now.

Discussion topic 2.

J. Mlinarics – But where do we stand in correlation with the EU member states in general?

P. Horváth – says, this is again a realtive point. Let's take the example of public telephone line supply rate. It is, for example 100% in South Korea whereas only 73% here in Hungary but the number of broadband subscriptions is just one order of magnitude less to the narrow bandwidth internet connections. However, broadband internet is a rapidly growing business, which is very much influenced by the national telecom company, MATAV, who is makig an enormuously "strong" business policy on selling DSL type of connections in order to keep (and increase) his land-line subscriptions. However, not of all problems of edficiency can be solved by business oriented approach, there is a limit to it. The role of the government on one hand is regulatory, to formulate clear rules for the players of the market and to provide them with all the necessary conditions to operate, on the other hand it should take up the necessary responsibility for tackling down the problems in all areas where the pure business oriented solution would not be sufficient, where, for example, there is no real solvent demand. As the liberation of telecommunications doesn't solve all problems through business cases, the goverment needs to play and important proactive role in those areas.

J. Mlinarics – and what about the supporting technology, like wired and wireless solutions?

Gy. Ágoston – about wireless, it is partly the question of reguations, like the ferquency-regulation.

J. Mlinarics – but then, it's not really the matter of technology but much more of marketable high quality content.

P. Eckhardt – we just submitted an application to programme call managed the Minsitry of Informatics and Communications in the area of supporting innovative technical and business models for broadband access.

Gy. Ágoston – One of the hot issues nowadays is the interactive TV. The main discussion is about the nature of the research activities, How to deliver various content-types, like small-size, light, information-type content besides the heavy, film-type of content nto only through TV sets but also through other popular mobile and fixed devices.

Q.: J. Mlinarics – ensures that in his view, the supporting technology will be doubtlessly developed and available. But how do the experts and the participnats see it, what kind and type of services should be developed that the Hungarian potential customers would be able to and would be willing to buy? What are the main areas, like healthcare, learning, elearning, entertainment, etc. And what are, or what would be the abvious obstacles?

Z. Szombathy – says that in their view, when they talk about content, they first think of playful solutions or games, then they can move on to more serious matters. The term immediacy is driven by the content, local information, regional thinking and regional type of broadcasting. The importance of the archives on the local level is growing, the value localism is increasing.

Participant - Online games is a fast growing market and industry, see the example of South Korea.

L. Fekete – points out the the wide use of technology and its spreading goes with a much slower speed than the ongoing development and evolution of technology. Let's take the example of "early" sms, the common use of it needed to wait about 3 years from the time it was first available. It is all the same with wap and mms. In general, the mobile telephony gets into a completely different way of using communication tools and facilities.

P. Eckhardt – mentiones the example of music TV channels. The introduction and the use of new, non-TV type of devices greatly changes the opportunities and potentials, i.e. dowloadable mpeg formats, and the business models behind them. The mass-effect of this is huge, also, it is much easier to "move" and initate the target groups by involving them in side activities. i.e. sports and other events.

G. Ganczer – it is also important to mention the principle of equality, reporting sports events in various cross-media formats, mms, star chatting with the winners, etc. There is also an extremely importan matter, the intellectual property rights and the royalty fees, especially at the Olympic Games.

J. Mlinarics – emphasises that the matter of intellectal property rights and royalte fees is a top issue indeed.

P. Horváth – mentiones the matter of content distribution, especially considering the TV model, like on demand content, how to retrace earlier programmes, broadcasts. The main direction of the efforts is wireless, bradband multimedia, more services using the same communication channel. It will create the "boom" when the content developer industry finds end exploits this challenge.

F. Hámori – says, he can't really see when this boom would be coming, what the successful solution would look like, the solvent demand, etc. For example, he could believes that paying for content in some situation is rather obvious, in other ways not. It's like the pay channels. In some cases the customer "pays" through the mechanism of advertisments. However, there isn't such a great understanding between the telecommunication industry and the new media companies, due the missing paradigm change and to the fact, that the interest of the infrustructure supplier and of the content provider is ususally different.

Gy. Ágoston – the projected business modell and its realistion is ponderous, the return is not obvious. Some of the European modells failed already. The creation of relevant, suitable content, digitisation is expensive, it is in many cases not suitable for selling, it seems to be only successful when it is provided free of charge.

G. Magyar – confirms, that there hasn't been any successfully ended experiments until now, consequently every effort moves (or rather escapes) towards the public service. However, new technology rises which provides various alternatives for delivering content to the end users. This can be a challenge, depends on how we can exploit it.

Gy. Ágoston – there is and near end to the analogue broadcast technology, the future is to the digital broadcast only.

Participant - The customer still appears as a "phantom picture" amongst the players of the market. There are plenty of broadbands solutions and offers competeing with each other, however, the end user is not well informed. This creates a gap between the development of technology and the "readiness" of the customer, due to lack of education, and useful information. The "dear customer just relax while will do everything for you and fight for your favour" approach should be forgotten, and maybe the real breakthrough would come by involving the end user, even by taking the risk that the focus move from the inter-vendor related agreements and contracts to the actual preference of the customers (take the example of the car industry). The time, the content and the end user triplet for the moment is not inflienced by the end user, regardless to whatever TV channel. The the difference of the demand, the "apetite" and the perception of the end user is not articulated, the end user has to solve this problem on his own. The customer has to manually compose the content pool of his/her interest from various sources of information, like what to hear, watch, listen to, etc.

Gy. Ágoston – replies that is is rather difficult to imagine that one would completely involve the customer in the process of programme editing and composition. Also, the big question here is whether all customers would really like this or it is only just a small number of customers wanting to actively take part in the programme making process. This might be different for future generations, however, nowadays the question of interaction is only valid for the PC-type of devices. The integration of TV and PC is not a very attractive alternative at the moment, most the users would just like to "lean back" and enjoy it passively and not "leaning forward"...

Z. Szombathy – adds, that interactivity is important, so that the customer express his/her opinion. To raise a voice is the key aspect.

P. Horváth – says, that basically we have PC-based and TV-based options (which has further two subdivisions).

Participant – the traditional business modells will collapse in the television broadcasting business by taking into consideration the division between the technology and the content broadcasting. The key issue is find appropriate business models in which the expenses of technology can be easily embedded.

J. Mlinarics – mentiones and American example as a possible business case, where instead of general "open to all" advertisments only special domains and special companies get the rights for advertisments ofr certain channels, like telebanking and teleshopping only. Only special contracted vendors can offer adverts through their enhanced service to customers. This can cut the costs developing and implementing services. G. Magyar – the real failure behind the existing models is that they wanted to change everything at the same time, like the technology, the client application or device, the customers' behaviour and the offered content. This maybe too much at a time. If we could take this into consideration when developing new models, we may build up a service slower but surely with more reality. We could have the smaller steps financied by the EU comission through different programmes to make the model finacially less risky.

J. Mlinarics – are there any marketable Hunagrian solutions and services which we could successfully export?

Gy. Ágoston – refering back to the previous comment, not only the so far mentioned devices and technical solutions would mean the future but the HDTV too. This would be the platform of high quality content. The different efforts until now focus only on the production since the end user side is not yet (or rarely) ready, but the newly developed content is already availabe in extermely high quality sound and picture.

Z. Szombathy – believes that there wouldbe payable content provision.

F. Hámori – most of the content is language and culture dependent, however, there are some products which can rapidly go beyond thses boundaries, like computer and online games.

P. Horváth – mentions the necessity if a broadband-based distribution business model.

P. Eckhardt – mentions that the existing communications satelites are able to perform more functions that just "plain" TV broadcasts. There is an example of a joint project with the participation of 3 sites (a Czech, a Hungarian and a Polish site) and a German university to establish a two-way communication for virtual classrooms. With the involvment of other partners, they develop European elearning material in 3 different quality for various scenarios. The first is the traditional internet-based type, the second is with enriched multimedia solutions and the third is for real-time virtual classroom type of delivery. It also seems to be financially sustainable.

L. Fekete – there should be a perfect match between the content for sale and the payment method. The management of subscriptions is also very importnat like it is in the mobile telephone business models.

G. Magyar – we do have lots of interesting conent and application which can be competitive, like 3D technologies, the NDA (National Digital Archive) concept through international standards, elearning, developning Hungarian language content but the higher education still needs to catch up.

J. Mlinarics – is closing the discussion with the message to all the experts that there should be a concentrated focus on the cooperation with the SMEs.