Reverse Angle

I went to the recent IPTV World Forum 2008 show at Olympia. At least I went to the exhibition as the conference was quite expensive. As I walked in I was almost overwhelmed by the number of set top boxes on show. There were also a lot of head end server systems as well as myriad test tools and equipment. It reminded me of the IT trade shows I've been to. It seems to me that IPTV is hanging its hat on quality of service for TV distributed by ISPs like BT Vision whose model is so similar to broadcast as to be almost indistinguishable. One USP to the ISPs is that there are bundled facilities here to prevent churn - things like caller ID on your TV. My impression is that there are just too many players for the market to support. I think this for two reasons. First is that even if everyone deserts cable and satellite in favour of IPTV there are too many. But perhaps more significantly I think they have missed a trick. It's possible to get pretty much all of Freeview via the

The Quality Walk - Auditing the Production Workflow Just like a chubby little Brussels bureaucrat you’ve sat down and made comprehensive diagrams of all the important processes in your business. You’ve got Turtle diagrams wall to wall and now you’re wondering why you did it instead of the accounts, which are now overdue. Well, on their own, these diagrams are useful for training and when you’ve forgotten but not a lot else. But bear with me. If you want something to happen the same way every time then you have to accurately repeat the behaviour which produces what you want. That way you are likely to produce consistently. And, consistent results are what give you your reputation, So, if you’ve got a great way of doing things then it’s worth ensuring that the great way is what happens every time. And the way to do that? Auditing! Auditing is a horrible word. It implies dull and bureaucratic little fellows with bald heads and a Hitler moustache finding fault with everything a

Process Mapping for Digital Production Workflow A paragraph hidden near the end of my last diatribe contained an exhortation to use a simple system. Define what you do, frequently check that you do what you say you do, fix what you did wrong and then check to make sure you don’t make that same mistake again. And the subject of this month’s piece lies in the first four words. To pick a contemporary issue budget crunch forms a central problem for production. Despite the proliferation of channels to the viewer there loads of limits on budgets. The pressure to get it right first time, every time has never been higher. And this is getting worse as the old production paradigms struggle to deliver quality at ever reducing resource levels. What McDonalds can do with teenagers the world over is nothing short of a miracle. In fact what they can do with all employees and suppliers is pretty damn good. Repeatably and reliably McDonalds produce substantially the same product anywhere

In every industry that I’ve had anything to do with the word ‘Quality’ gets backs up faster than just about anything else. Well, perhaps some parts of the automotive industry are amenable but then they largely invented the concept in the last century. Perhaps it would help to start off with a definition. After all, the word means many different things to many different people. But the meaning that I want to convey is about how well something that you do meets requirements. Quality cannot exist in isolation. It is impossible for a badly run business to consistently meet the requirements of its stakeholders. No, not just customers but suppliers, staff, neighbours, shareholders, competitors, local and national government as well as any deities deemed interested in the business. They're the stakeholders, they're all are concerned with it. For a business of any type to succeed it must satisfy a disparate group of entities that have a stake in it. And their objectives are all