Tag Archives: STB
STB Bugs
I have worked with a number of clients in the delivery of new STB code and new STBs over my career. I have prided myself that I could work a team to identify bugs that ultimately would be seen as customer defects (the difference between bugs and defects is something worthy of an entire post [...]
Carrier IQ and STBs
The furore around Carrier IQ’s diagnostic and usage logging on mobile phones is a salutory lesson for the TV operator industry about logging too much information and not informing the viewer sufficiently. What! I hear you say, usage is tracked on my STB? Of course it is tracked particularly on IPTV and OTT services, as [...]
Memories of IBC2011
It has been over two weeks since my heady five days at the RAI in Amsterdam, the first without construction work for the first time in quite a few years. As always there was an awful lot of catching up with friends and ex-colleagues, but there was a serious amount of tech fun to see [...]
Google TV Will “Change the Way People Live their Lives”.. Maybe…
Not so sure about this one, it would take a lot to change many people’s lives - Google TV Will “Change the Way People Live their Lives”. Yet to get around the sensationalist views, this is an important new product. However its importance to European TV users requires breaking through the content quality barrier and also [...]
IBC2010 is at an end
There… it is finished, and by many accounts it has been a very successful one for the industry, although I would like to see the gross receipts from business done before I would crown it. It was a business-like IBC, with no real wow ‘almost products’, but an awful lot of ready to ship technology [...]
Anga Cable 2010
I found myself with a spare day in the week due to an interesting approach to public holidays by the Netherlands. With this I decided to take a day trip over to Cologne to take in a show that previously I had always found myself unable to attend – Anga 2010. This show is organised [...]
Apple Spreading out of its’ Orchard?
There is some speculation based on the flimsiest of a job posting (Apple To Bring iPhone OS To New Gadgets) that Apple could be looking to expand beyond the iPad device, as that being a first step beyond the phone and handheld information device world – perhaps into the mainstream TV world. Apple have had [...]
Cooling of the IPTV Set-Top Market
The cooling of the IPTV set-top market as reported by Broadband TV News is an interesting development. IPTV set-top market is ‘cooling down’ : Broadband TV News. Much of the growth identified in the report was down to market launches which mop up the early adopters very easily. However, we have not seen the organic [...]
Digital Transition Approaches
Quite famously, the US chose the big bang approach to the removal of Analogue Terrestrial transmission and its replacement with Digital, something completely different to the UK approach which takes place over a four year period. This was scheduled for February 17th 2009 several years ago, and it is rapidly approaching. However there is now [...]
DVR Success in the UK
The recent Ofcom report which stated that UK viewers are, as a proportion, more likely to own a DVR/PVR, was really promising, showing that 30% of viewers have one, as reported by InformITV and others. However the numbers have been questioned by InformITV based on a quick count of the numbers across each platform, estimating [...]