My compliments to Andrew Glasspool and his colleagues at Farncombe Technologies for two important, closely argued white papers published this year that are barometers of the changing times we live in.
Their most recent paper, published this  week, on the Common Scrambling Algorithm (CSA) mandate that many pay-TV deployments must accommodate illustrates very succinctly how technical decisions that once were wholly supportable [...]

Traditional pay-TV operators have always been highly focused on revenue security by way of theft of service prevention – for two main reasons. Subscriber fees are obviously a significant revenue source and piracy through theft of service is very prevalent, particularly in certain markets (See CASBAA for country-specific piracy rates). Smart cards were really the [...]

At the recent Television 3.0 conference in Los Angeles, I was pleased to find some fresh and interesting perspectives on mobile TV from execs at CBS Interactive and their mobile TV partner Transpera.
They set out to dispel some commonly held “truths” regarding behavior on consuming mobile TV based on current research.  For me, it added [...]

Seems that I wasn’t persuasive enough in my discussions at IBC 2009 with Ben Schwarz at VideoNet where we talked about extending pay-TV models into Internet delivery. Overall, I’m happy to be described as living in an alternate reality where sites like today’s Hulu do not represent the entire future of video services. I hope [...]

I got a warm reception this week at the STB 2009 conference in San Jose where many speakers were presenting on the convergence between pay-TV and Internet delivery channels. Also see Jeff Vinson’s blog write up. On the topic how to live in a multi-DRM world, I presented it as a challenge from both a [...]

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