Netflix, LG, and Broadband TV

LG is putting out a new series of TVs with a direct broadband hookup and with this they are entering into a partnership with Netflix. Netflix has been partnering with everyone and their mother to extend their reach and make it as easy as possible for their customers to be able to download movies. I think more TV manufacturers will come out with broadband enabled TVs and the movie industry should embrace this as much as possible as well as these Netflix partnerships. It would be great to be able to pay to watch new release movies via this type of service. 

While I was at Verizon I would let anyone who would listen know that I thought the best thing for Verizon to do was buy Netflix and really push the broadband portion of the business. I also though they should have bought TiVo and use their software as the FiOS platform. 

Below is a good interview with Reed Hastings the CEO of Netflix who talks about their broadband strategy. All in all I think Netflix has done a great job at creating a broadband strategy and pushing it through as much as possible, now I just home the studios and content providers follow along.

IPTV

I saw this post on NewTeeVee, a really good sister blog of GigaOM, Om Malik's broadband blog. The post is about the TelcoTV event, a conference all about the IPTV space.  Obviously Verizon (my former employer) and AT&T were both well represented.  As you can see from the post there doesn't seem to be much to report other than the proclamation that 2009 is going to be all about IPTV. 

I have my doubts while I was at VZ everyone who worked on FiOS talked highly about it but there seemed to be very little strategy that gave a distinct road map of where FiOS TV was headed and how it was going to get there. I wasn't involved in the day to day build out of the product so it could be that the strategy was never articulated to me or anyone in the group I worked in, which is a real possibility for VZ since there are lots of silos and information is power. I always got the sense that people were kind of flying by the seat of their pants in trying to figure out what the product should be and what they could do now. There were and still are a hodgepodge of random partnerships that seemed like spec sheet partnerships (in other words someone said music and gaming are big online so lets do these partnerships with content companies so we can cover that off and if anyone asks we can say we have it). This never seemed all that strategic to me. Ultimately, I think FiOS had a great chance of succeeding mostly because the cable companies are a mess. I only wish that VZ would open up the FiOS TV platform and allow other companies and developers to create applications that would live on the platform rather than having these hokey widgets that no one really cares about.