At least one of the less obvious challenges related to delivering rich combinations of TV services to all these connected TVs and portable platforms is reproducing many aspects of the live TV experience in a scalable fashion. None of the critical adaptive bitrate streaming protocols out there, specifically Smooth Streaming and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), have been defined in a way that makes it easy to support tens of thousands of concurrent subscribers watching a major live event such as the soccer World Cup in real time. When compared to the well-honed DVB broadcast technologies, some of the key issues of practical concern, like managing semi-synchronized key changes and addressing revenue leakage through re-broadcasting of various kinds, are not yet developed to scale in a streaming environment. Addressing these kinds of issues takes Internet TV to the commercial level necessary to truly reproduce the pay-TV service paradigm–and associated revenue models – that we are all familiar with.

Where did the quest for highest quality and best picture disappear? Actually, it did not.

As we discussed with Herve Utheza, president of our partner company RCDb, during a session on “Tapping into the Blu-ray Potential” at NAB 2011, OTT is also coming to our living rooms bringing Hollywood content to a device that everybody is familiar with, is simple to use and always brought quality entertainment for the whole family.

I was going to start with the same sentence as last time when returning from the IPTV World Forum in London: “sitting at a cafe in Heathrow airport sipping a cup of very good coffee…” But since the IBC 2010 was in Amsterdam, I had to say goodbye to The Netherlands by indulging in a [...]

Will service providera will jump on the VP8 bandwagon without being able to accommodate all licensing fees into their business model upfront? From the point of view of revenue security, it seems that rather than uniting the world behind a common (OK, supposedly free) codec, Google is really driving a wedge between commercial content and user-generated content.