It is no secret that the internet is fast becoming a battle ground between cable providers and emerging alternative delivery methods such as Hulu and Boxee for providing television content.

A recent article in Business Week does a great job of outlining the power struggles and the importance of identity to the existing cable franchises for tapping new distribution channels.

In a blog post today, Nielsen Co. highlights data from its Three Screen Report showing that 59% of Americans are now using TV and internet simultaneously at least one time per month, spending 3.5 simultaneous hours each month on both. Those numbers are up 35% from last year.

The numbers indicate that televisions and computers more and more are co-existing in living rooms. Clearly from the viewers' perspective, the PC and the television are becoming merely device choices for existing digital content, along with smartphones.

Over the past year, active mobile video users grew by 57%, up to 17.6 million, according to Nielson. The report links the rise to the growth in smartphone usage. Nielson also notes that online video is used like DVR and isn't a replacement in most cases for watching TV.

The Nielson data shows that users from the age of 25-34 spend the most time "timeshifting" their viewing (DVR and watch later). That behavior aligns with Nielson's research that shows Americans turn to online for delivery of network programs when they miss an episode or when a TV is not available.

The true results of that behavior are likely to come to life in the future given that the 25-34 demographic is currently helping raise a generation of users to think television isn't tied to any particular device.

The changes in the television and cable industry are but one hot area where digital delivery is starting to provide examples as to why digital identity is so important.

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Earlier this week I discussed SAML and how it meets the requirements around TV Everywhere authentication.  While SAML 2.0 looks to be the de facto solution for solving the TV Everywhere authentication problem, there is still some debate as to what mechanisms and protocols will be used to address how authorization decisions are made by the MVPD’s on behalf of the programmers. XACML is the leading candidate, but XACML is only a starting point that defines the syntax for expressing an authorization query and an authorization response.

The first question is to define an appropriate back-channel protocol to convey the XACML authorization queries and responses between programmers and MVPD’s. This could be achieved via the XACML profile for SAML, or even via a simple REST API.

In addition a TV Everywhere specific taxonomy for authorization queries that programmers ask of MVPD’s needs to be defined. This taxonomy is dependent on the business rules that will be established for TV Everywhere. For example, if the user is trying to watch an R-rated program then the programmer needs to check with the MVPD before making the content available to the user.  The query could be one of ‘What is the users birth date?,  ‘Is the user over 18?’ or ‘Can this user watch Mature content?’.  

Another issue is that, unlike books and ISBN numbers, there is no globally unique identification system for programming content. Each MVPD and programmer has its own content classification and identification system. This becomes problematic if the MVPDs need to make authorization decisions based on the specific program each user is attempting to watch.  What do you do in federated authorization model where the object or resource (i.e. the program) is known by a different identifier at the programmer and the MVPD? Best case is to define an MVPD neutral identification scheme for all programming content.

The TV Everywhere industry is driving to have this all wrapped up by September 2010. It should be a fun ride participating in this effort and watching it all unfold.