Sitting at a cafe in Heathrow airport after the IPTV World Forum and sipping a cup of very good coffee, I am pondering over my impressions from the show. It is a fascinating and very fragmented world. Too many components, too many dependencies, too complex integration and most likely an involved customization effort. (I saw this echoed [...]

Verimatrix deploys industry’s first cardless security system with Filipino broadcaster ABS-CBN on DVB-S and IPTV networks within a unified security head-end

We are in full swing with our tradeshow schedule for 2010! We had our team covering bases for CSTB in Moscow, Andina Link in Colombia and CABSAT in Dubai. Now, we’ve all complained about tradeshows – they are costly, require a large amount of company resources to make them successful and can be murder if [...]

Mark Holmes of ViaSatellite recently tackled the latest issues around content piracy and theft of service in Asia. While analog cable systems are the biggest target for piracy, satellite pay-TV operators are certainly feeling the impact of service theft. Quoting the deputy CEO of CASBAA, “The nature of the satellite business is that it doesn’t [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Are Internet video services, such as Hulu and the iPlayer, a threat to established pay-TV operators? The jury is still out.  While pundits insist that a significant number of current pay-TV subscribers will stop their monthly payments and go wholly broadband, some surveys suggest that overall we are just all watching more video from all [...]