Last month (March 2008), I participated on a panel on games and TV at the TV of Tomorrow show in San Francisco's Yerba Buena center. Participating on the panel were representatives from some of the top games technology providers, software publishers and creative developers.
What came out at the panel was that the impact of games on interactive TV has already been influential in TV, and, indeed games are already changing the TV landscape by altering distribution platforms, content programming and, finally, production environments.
XBox Live subscribers have been able to download and play TV shows and movies for more than a year now with the XBox Live Marketplace, consuming content provided by partners the likes of ABC, CBS, Viacom and Warner Brothers, among many, many others. It's the first viable "over-the-top" alternative to cable VOD, and it's only a glimpse of what's still to come.
Add to that development this one: European IPTV providers are already saddling up their Trojan horse, with British Telecom announcing in January at CES that it is deploying XBox game consoles as an alternative (and much more interesting) option to a regular STB for provision of its BT Vision TV service. On the PS3 side, Korea Telecom announced it's deploying and IPTV service in November.
Interestingly, AT&T's Uverse services uses the same software OS as the BT service, Microsoft Mediaroom. There are already rumors of an AT&T XBox-enabled TV service in the works for US deployment. The XBox-enabled experience combine Microsoft Mediaroom-enabled TV service with next-generation gaming, as well as unique iTV-ish new like social networking. XBox Live is already the world's largest online social network in the living room, and will offer UK viewers with a wide range of community-based features, such as voice chat, sending and receiving text and voice messages, and accessing Xbox LIVE Marketplace, all while watching TV.
These are the kinds of experiences that enables are the same futuristic scenarios that we've been hearing and saying at cable industry tradeshows for the last decade. And there are literally millions of these devices already attached to TV's in America's living rooms, setting the stage for an iTV revolution.
Tomorrow, I'll tell you about how games are either changing TV programming or actually becoming a form of programming on TV.
