Future TV: AT&T Discusses iPhone Content Research

A top AT&T executive in a keynote speech at the Future TV show Tuesday revealed findings from an internal survey of iPhone users that supports the company’s three-screen IPTV strategy by suggesting that owners of the mobile devices are using them for far more than just local and long-distance voice calls.

The service provider has maintained from the outset that its strategy is to provide compelling content via landlines to TVs and PCs, as well as to mobile devices – such as iPhones – connected to the operator’s vast wireless network.

“Traditional TV is not going away,” emphasized Amy Friedlander-Hoffman, senior vice-president of programming at AT&T, which expects to have one million customers of its U-verse IPTV service. “It’s just evolving.”

AT&T is the exclusive carrier of Apple’s popular iPhone in the United States.

Hoffman said the survey revealed that iPhone users have ended up using twice the amount of Internet data as the company originally intended., though she did not disclose the corresponding figures. More than 50 percent of those surveyed said they had watched a video from YouTube, the widely used user-generated video destination.

Again beyond voice, AT&T said 46 percent of respondents have used the iPhone to download music. Of the users surveyed by the telco, 34 percent claimed they had watched news programming on the portable, multifunction devices.

“The biggest lesson here is this shows that if you make it simple enough, people will consume all types of content out there,” said Friedlander-Hoffman.

But three-screen strategy talk for content must be grounded in the reality of service providers needing to integrate networks for the full effect, and that requires more than interconnection. That’s why AT&T is working with IMS to be able to eventually offer what many call seamless services, where consumers take their video from a TV, outside the house to a mobile phone carried with them, for example.

AT&T’s three-screen approach last year translated into offering golf coverage of the Masters available on its IPTV service and at its BlueRoom Web site, while providing leader board info and alerts to its wireless customers, explained Friedlander-Hoffman.

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