Targeted Broadband and Digital TV News

This is a reminder for many of you, and that is that this blog maintains an aggregate news feed of hand picked content that is pertinent to the Broadband and Digital TV industries, paying quite a bit of attention towards consumer devices such as STBs and other video/information devices. You can access this information off the masthead – see the ‘News Headlines in Detail‘ option, or for the information deficient amongst us you can subscribe to the RSS feed via the same page.

Give it a try and get access to the best of the best sites and content out there… who knows you may actually start visiting these great sites directly yourself!

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Electronic Content Guides coming next

bt-vision The entertainment world has become a complex place compared to 20+ years ago. Back then the UK had 4 channels and the biggest challenge was in ensuring that you had an in house distribution feed for those terrestrial analogue channels, that you had remote control capability and that on at least one TV you had a video player/recorder and a video rental shop account. Simple times.

Now we have a combination of analogue (for a short while at least) and digital services provided by at least two methods – terrestrial and cable/satellite, combined with a proliferation of PVR/DVR devices, video on demand, push video on demand, OTT services such as iPlayer, iTunes and others, music services such as iTunes, Napster, and Spotify, and other video/music content newly converted into digital forms. The world is a mix of scheduled broadcast and on demand content delivered from near and far storage. This is a very complex environment, which operators and consumer electronics companies are starting to fight over as they recognise that this is the future, and that this is where money can be made and lost, business models found and destroyed.

Much of the effort is on making this home environment interoperable so that content can be as easily as possible delivered to whatever device the consumer wants to watch it on, whilst making some sort of profit on the transaction – either from the initial content purchase or even the actual viewing event itself. Some of the effort is focused on how to find and distribute the content but not a lot, and this home ecology has many solutions which focus on where the content is and provide a user interface that reflects this. The User Interfaces are a mish-mash of TV, DVR, Network, Internet, or local content. This, in my view, is not going to be a success as it leaves complexity management to the consumer, a consumer who actually does not wish to even think about where the content is or what the content is in format – only whether it is video or audio, and what that content is – the TV episode, the music track, the film, the photograph.

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The consumer in my view wants a cloud approach – not a cloud as in the current Internet view of applications somewhere out there -  but a cloud into which content is placed and out of which content is played out, a cloud that comprises local and far storage that does not bother the consumer with exactly where it really is – the cloud hides that. It is about the content … stupid after all.

In line with this, a new UI needs to appear… something akin to the EPG – the Electronic Programme Guide you see on all STBs, something that I like to call ECG – the Electronic Content Guide. This would be a UI that concentrates on the content and not where it is, that presents the content to the user as content they already have access to full time, content that they can have temporary access to, and content that can be shared around. This ECG would include in that view content that is being made available from the past, from the present and from the future. This would present the consumer with an old film that the person owns for example, give them access to content that is being played out now such as a football event and content that will be available in the near future such as the next episode of a hot new TV series. The challenge will be in presenting it with today’s technology and with the involvement of today’s content owners, distributors and device manufacturers.

More on this soon. What do you think of the UI and home ecology of the near future?

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Bandwidth Change of Fortune

upc_logo350 In 1998, I worked for a company involved with cable companies in Poland. As part of my role at the time, I had to work with our IT teams there and in one key respect we had a major problem. The main headquarters in an University of Warsaw co located building was connected to the outside world using a set of low bandwidth leased lines. I say low bandwidth now but back then we were talking high speed, greater than 64Kbps links. This was fine within the country, and allowed email and Internet access to a wide variety of sites but there was one major problem. For any sites outside of Warsaw or Poland (which was most of the sites anyone wanted), the actual data transfer speed peaked at 2.3kbps. Yes, that is a decimal point in there. This was for a major company, a company located in a good place in Warsaw. For the senior management at home in the suburbs of Warsaw or even outside of the city, the Internet connectivity local loop was dial up (as it mainly was in the UK back then), but then we were still talking about lower than 2kbps data transfers at best. For many of the management, they found that they could not get anything due to the quality of the phone lines and even that they had to wait 18 months for the phone line to be installed into their apartment.

In the UK, I was enjoying full line speed 128kbps to 256kbps leased circuits for the main business location (which was increased to 2Mbps by 2000) and at home we had ISDN2 services giving me 128kbps service to my home. Cable connections were giving 256/512kbps services and ADSL was in trial. The comparison between the two countries was stark.

Now fast forward 10 years and the roles are reversed. In the UK we have up to 8Mbps services over ADSL and for those lucky few, we have between 20 and 50Mbps on cable and ADSL2+ services for the home. Many business make use of the lower contention ADSL services with the same speeds. Poland however has just launched 120Mbps services. Yes you see it right, 120Mbps. And more importantly, that speed is available against International sites.

This is an important message to Digital Britain and the UK government… up your game unless you want us to be left behind.

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IBC2009 Informal Social Meetup

social Are you in Amsterdam for IBC2009? at a loose end after all the vendor or customer meetings and want a relaxing drink in convivial surroundings? A number of Amsterdam bound and Amsterdam housed Digital TV professionals are going to be meeting up for an informal drink inside/outside (Weather dependent) of Hoopmans (http://www.hoopman.nl/hoopman.htm ) in Leidseplein, Amsterdam on Saturday 12th September at around 21:30 and onwards.

It is nice and central, and easy to find and is on the main tram routes (1, 2, and 5). If you want to come along, then please do but it would be great if you could RSVP beforehand. On the night itself, if we are not obvious you can drop us a call on +31 652390599.

Ian Nock and Ken Carroll

UPDATE: For those of you who are on Linkedin, you can RSVP via the event link http://events.linkedin.com/IBC2009-Informal-Social-Meetup/pub/121942

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IBC 2009 Approaching…

ibcred The blog has been a little quiet, but this has been down to some pretty intense project work for a major vendor. However IBC is quickly approaching and thoughts are now turning to what is coming and what I shall be looking at for my annual time there (although a little curtailed compared to normal as the project work I am involved in continues…). What do you expect out of IBC2009?

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Looking uphill at the Next Generation

It is interesting from the UK perspective, getting a view of the next generation – even more so than what Virgin Media can provide. It certainly puts the Digital Britain 2Mbps at the bottom of the hill, particularly when you look at the upstream speed capability available in the Netherlands…

UPC in the Netherlands

I’m living in Almere. It’s one of the first towns in the Netherlands that gets both FTTH from KPN/Reggefiber as well as UPC’s Docsis 3.0 offer Fiber Power. I thought it would be good to compare the offers.

Internet Thought: UPC Fiber Power triumphant over KPN FTTH

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CES – Broadband and Digital Technology

CES is happening in Las Vegas right now and a great many new announcements for products and services are being made. It is really worthwhile to keep up with what is going on there. Now we are not ‘doin the bloggin thing’ and blogging the show but you will notice that the News Headlines feed will see a lot more action over these days… drop in on News Headlines to see some, or look out at the many gadget and technology sites that are out there reporting on it.

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IBC2008 Audio Resources

Super fun bonus for DTV folks, there is a very good resource for those who could not attend the conference side of IBC – audio recordings in MP3 format of the sessions. You may lose a little from not having visuals, but this is nothing to be sniffed at.

You can find these on http://qedsessions.mc.sideshow.com/ibc2008/session/. All you have to do is download them and play them back, either on your PC or your other favourit portable device. If you want, you can also go back to IBC2007 as the same sort of content is available for then.

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IBC2008 D-Day approaches

As mentioned earlier, I am travelling to IBC2008 in Amsterdam. My thoughts earlier were about IPTV breaking big time this year, and I think that is a given. The interesting thing will be whether this will be in the connected home sense. What I mean by this, is a full in-home/out-of-home multi-vendor, standards based ecology of devices that together are much more than they are singly. We shall see. I will post before, during and after IBC about what I see.

I will be there from Friday 12th through to Tuesday 16th and I am available to meet and network… just contact me via this link.

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