Yes, that is a bona fide confession of a fairly bright communications expert that has been around this industry a long time. I won’t tell you who she is….just that she is near and dear to my heart….a-hem…(next time you hear that I never watch television because I am too busy, just translate “I have watched the same episode of CSI ten times because I can’t seem to move the arrow to what I want to see…so I give up”)
 
The thought occurred to me the other day as I stumbled with the remote, trying to change channels, ending up on the menu button and restarting a show I have already watch three times all the while never actually landing on any programming I intended to;  that I must look like a crazed male with ADD to anyone actually recording my usage or “consumer behavior”. I can’t imagine how any conclusive data about ratings could be mined from my viewing habits, although one six month old episode CSI would rank pretty high up there. It was interesting for me to think about all the innovation going on in the cable industry, will 50% of the population have to rely on their high school junior to decipher codes, buttons, icons, and pure luck to simply watch the evening news? There is a phrase I heard recently at a TM Forum staff meeting that basically things should be “grandma proof”.  This should not only include labor intensive program guides and remotes, but also the data that comes out of the home network. When I speak of the necessity of tracking and monitoring data, executives get headaches, architects faint, and developers run away. It seems that when thinking about the complexity of trending data, we think of passing billions of records that need to be sorted, used, aggregated, and placed in the appropriate system. Though this path is not totally unfeasible, it exists only in a company that has no use for standards.
 
I have been in the standards industry for a long time and if I had a dime for every time a large company tells me that they “use propriety interfaces” I think, “bet your develop costs are through the roof”. See not only is software expensive to code for every single change that needs to be made, but even an inflexible data model (aka the data you select to receive and store and the way in which it is aggregated and disseminated) is basically the effort of undoing and redoing each time a new element needs to be tracked or a new system or software requires a different aggregation of the data. The act of data modeling in the grand scheme of personalization (whether that is advertising or other content) requires a path, condition,  and direction  for each piece of information that is needed. Interfaces like Cablelabs “tru2way” give the ability to specify those elements and determine the appropriate path for your consumers data. Understandably the same elements that are needed for troubleshooting and capacity management is not the same as my need to determine a premium advertising standard.  Use cases and detailed scenarios are needed to accurately draw conclusions about anything this data that bring you. Which brings me to my next (and final) point.
 
Being a “industry participant” is important. The ability for multiple MSOs to do collaborative work is a foundational need for the standardization or “uniformity” of key data needed to create a new market or market program. With this is mind TM Forum is calling together all MSOs globally to come together and work from the need to have a sufficient and robust data model. We are reaching out next week at the Cable Congress show in Madrid to launch a new advertising counsel that will be instrumental in establishing  common norms around the gathering, aggregation, and dissemination of key data elements that will allow the cross referencing of multiple data points within a “micro demographic” that will deliver very valuable advertising and content to that specific home. We are joined by experts in the industry from UPC, EuroCablelabs, Sigma, and Seachange that will explain and educate on the advertising potential in Europe. TM Forum will then unveil a plan to get our collective hands around this data mystery of “personalization”. Session is at noon on Friday at the Cable Congress 2008 show. We hope to see you all there.
 
And remember…..Bring your remote…I could use the practice.