IP-Based Surveillance Market: Take a Look

The market for IP-based video surveillance equipment grew about 50 percent in 2007, say researchers at MultiMedia Intelligence. It's a new market, so equipment sales will not knock your socks off: $500 million worldwide. But that's a comparative growth rate 400 percent higher than for traditional cameras and other gear to support video surveillance. And IP gear tends to be smaller and cheaper, so more equipment is bought, even at lower aggregate sales volumes.

The important thing to note is that many of those cameras are connected to live monitoring centers. That's another IP trunking revenue stream.

Also, keep in mind that high-defintion plasma displays are starting to show up in more retail and professional settings than one has seen in the past. Video, in short, is starting to become an immersive medium, not confined to traditional TV screens. That's going to represent lots more opportunities for services, applications and gear.

All those screens have to be installed and configured, for example. That's going to increase the amount of work available to multimedia "home theater" installers, for example. And since some increasing number of those video screens are going to be networked, a new type of application for traditional value added resellers to support as well. That's not to mention video services and bandwidth sales.

Skype Revamps Unlimited Calling Plans

Jim Courtney at Skype Journal says Skype has revamped all of its Skype Pro plans by creating flat rate unlimited (fair use of 10,000 minutes a month) international calling plans covering landline numbers in 35 countries, plus mobile numbers in some countries.

Among the notable changes are the cheaper calling plans for users who call between the United States and Mexico, elimination of connection fees and greater plan simplicity.

The plans do not require a contract. Users can buy plans covering calling to Canada and the United States; Canada, the United States and Mexio; or 32 countries plus Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Users also can upgrade their plans on a temporary basis. All plans include voice mail.

For users in Canada and U.S. the three plans:cost $2.95, $5.95 and $9.95 a month. European user plans cost €2.95 per month for calls within a single country, unlimited calling within 20 European countries for €3.95 per month and unlimited calling to 35 countries for €8.95 a month.

Similar plans are available for users in Asia, Brazil and the rest of the world.

Web TV Passes Legacy TV in Australia

Nielsen Online reports that, for the first time, Australians are spending more time online than they were watching TV. Nielsen Online says users are watching an average of 13.7 hours a week watching Internet TV compared with 13.3 hours of legacy TV.

Roy Morgan claims that the difference is because it used a representative cross-sample of the Australian population, including heavy, medium, light and non-Internet users, while the Nielsen data was based on an online panel that didn't cover all Australians.

UGC: No Business Model?

eMarketer projects that the number of US User-Generated Content creators will rise to 108 million in 2012, from 77 million in 2007.

But, despite the projected growth in the numbers of content creators, the monetization of user-generated media has not materialized, eMarketer suggests.

Retail models have not caught on, either, and advertisers are reluctant to attach their brands to content that is, by its nature, unpredictable, eMarketer says.

Well, what did you expect? Is there a business model, beyond connections, for email or chat or talking? People create because they can, and they want to. Service providers will make some money providing the ability to do so. There might be a bit of advertising for email or chat apps.

But for the most part, user-generated content will not generally lead to a business model for its creators. UGC is not really a "medium." It is communications. Some UGC will be monetized, just as some independent films wind up getting commercial success. It happens. But i won't be common.

iPhone Keyboards, Bigger Screens?

As much as Apple's iPhone has surfaced latent demand for new mobile Web behaviors, the next rounds of development will have to tackle more prosaic issues: proliferating the product line to better address market segments: heavier texters who like keys and larger screens for users who really want to use the device as a notebook substitute.

There is every likelihood, in other words, that the iconic iPhone form factor will diversify, the way iPods have, with models optimized for particular use cases.

Industry sources told Times Online that the device will have a "radically different" appearance to the current device, which has a 4.5 inch screen and slick, aluminium backing. Among the possibilities are flip version, which would enable the screen to be larger, and a sliding model with a regular qwerty keyboard - as opposed to a touchscreen one.

The Financial Times even thinks Apple will within a year or so change distribution deals, abandoning single-carrier franchises as early as June 2009 in the U.S. market and October 2009 in the U.K. market.

That of course likely will lead to a change in revenue streams, from revenue-sharing payments to transactions and Internet advertising. That would be a fairly abrupt shift of income stream, but a necessary step to build greater device handset volumes and ad potential.

More Aggressive Prepaid Mobile Efforts

Prepaid mobile calling offers have gotten more competitive over the past year as the overall market continues to saturate. T-Mobile launched FlexPay, providing prepaid customers the same plans as those currently available to contract subscribers.

Verizon Wireless enhanced its pay-as-you-go INpulse plans by creating lower voice and messaging rates. Boost Mobile, meanwhile, introduced Unlimited by Boost to counter prepaid offers from Leap Wireless and MetroPCS.

As carriers and mobile virtual network operators search for new subscribers, they increasingly are targeting the prepaid customer base. Not only are more carriers launching postpaid-like monthly prepaid plans that include buckets of minutes and value-added features, but they are also extending value-added services to standard prepaid services such as messaging buckets and even unlimited messaging.

Carriers have even started selling prepaid customers subsidized handsets, which is something that was unheard of in the industry just 18 months ago.

T-Mobile arguably is the most aggressive of the major carriers in competing with the regional prepaid players. Up to this point AT&T and Verizon Wireless have mostly avoided chasing that customer segment with any vigor.

Broken Internet by 2010?

"We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,"
Jim Cicconi, AT&T VP, says, in a speech reported by the Financial Times.

"In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today," Cicconi maintains.

He argues that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" will increase 50-fold by 2015.

"Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute," he says, predicting that "video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today."