So what was the topic of this year’s biggest digital TV conference? Well, actually, I was disappointed because it was multi-screen or any screen or something along those lines. But why is it disappointing you ask? Because we have been promoting this concept for years! And specifically securing premium pay TV content to all screens that subscribers find useful. In reality, I am really quite pleased that the industry finally caught up with our innovative security approach.

Let me offer you my observation about at least one of the less obvious challenges related to delivering rich combinations of TV services to all these connected TVs and portable platforms.  The challenge is reproducing many aspects of the live TV experience in a scalable fashion. Therefore, we are firm believers that, as this market matures, Internet TV services will naturally need a combined solution for both on-demand and live consumption.

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 – with which we are all familiar. This is where our experience from the IPTV and DVB worlds comes in really handy; where content is distributed to millions of subscribers while managing device entitlement, device security and frequent real-time rights changes.

If this makes you wonder if your current or planned multi-screen service scales beyond just a proof of concept or a friendly trial, give us a call. We are happy to show you how our VCAS for Internet solves this problem without installing a large number of servers in your head-end.

And don’t forget to stop by an old-fashioned cheese farm while visiting Gouda.

So, this time I was not sipping coffee at a foreign airport nor feeding my sweet tooth with poffertjes. This year I drove to NAB and it is hard to type while driving 320 miles back from Las Vegas to San Diego. I still can’t find a good app on my Android phone that would take my dictations and convert them to text.

But back to NAB. It seems like tablets were everywhere and if your booth didn’t have one, you were not cool (of course we had one or two as well). And it is all related to over-the-top (OTT) distribution of content, especially video. I can’t help but feel that the direction the industry is going is questionable: from HD video on a large screen TV to a low-bitrate, low-resolution video on a portable device.

I know, I get it, it is all about mobility and “on my time” and “wherever I am.” So it certainly has its benefits and the video quality is improving every day through better implementations of adaptive bit-rate streaming and ever increasing bandwidth.

The content quality is also improving as studios are getting more comfortable to release pay-TV movies and episodes when they are protected by conditional access (CA) or digital rights management (DRM). This was the point of our production-ready OTT demos streaming protected video to iPhones, Android phones, laptops and Macs, and yes, even iPads and Android tables (to make sure we fit right into the NAB buzz!).

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,” 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.

Yes, you guessed it; the good ol’ Blu-ray player. It is the most deployed entertainment device (including BD-enabled game consoles) already connected to your living-room large screen TV. And now, when you connect it to your broadband and insert the RCDb-Verimatrix disc (or rather a disc branded with your OTT service), Eureka! You have access to potentially thousands of movie titles, TV episodes and even live content from the comfort of your sofa (and no, it does not serve beer yet – we need to leave some room for phase 2).

And the beauty is that it plays on all BD players with BD-Live 2.0 capability (virtually all recently manufactured players) and it has a standard built-in DRM called Advanced Access Content System (AACS) used to protect all Blu-ray titles today.

A popular device, standardized around the world, capable of delivering high value paid content and already purchased by the consumer. Sounds like a sweet spot to me.

Speaking of sweet spots – if you still don’t know what poffertjes are, let’s meet at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam.

Anyway, IBC 2010 was exciting especially for us consumers. Large screens, 3D, 20-channel audio, video on any device (sorry no toasters yet), interactivity, personalization, more commercials (sorry, did not mean to be facetious), combination with social networking (c’mon, get off Facebook at least while watching movies).  

All the new technologies are giving us more freedom in what, where, when, on what device and with whom we watch. That should be all good, right? It should also give us access to more content that suits our personalities, family values, sense of humor and so on. Yet more is not necessarily better – personal recommendation engines that have our interests in mind without compromising our privacy are coming to the rescue. At the end of the day, it is really up to all of us to make the right choices when spending our valuable time in front of the tube (in whichever form factor it comes today). 

Alright, philosophy aside, one thing that drew a lot of interest from content and service providers this year was a good old DVD player. You are wondering how could that be, right? OK, it was an off-the-shelf connected Blu-ray player (a.k.a. BD-Live), which allows any service provider to deliver their content to a device that millions of users already own.  No custom integration, no special embedded applications – just an ordinary Blu-ray disc that launches a service provider’s entire VOD library (without competing with the maze of preinstalled applications and widgets).

And of course, even though we are talking about an over-the-top (OTT) delivery here, this is protected content that is perfectly suitable for a paid service. In addition, it is protected by AACS, which is natively implemented by every BD player and loved and trusted by studios (or so they tell me). It is actually pretty surprising with all the talk about standardizing DRM. Here is a device that can play the best HD content and already comes with a multi-vendor DRM system. 

The BD-Live technology also provides support for different business models and usage rules. The fact that this is a two-way connected device also enables service providers to update the look & feel, as well as functionality, online, which guarantees the user is always running the latest version of the service. 

From a security point of view, the dynamic entitlement control, monitoring of suspicious behavior possibly related to piracy attempts, ability to insert a user-specific forensic watermark and online revocation makes this service more secure than shipping traditional Blu-ray discs.

And I almost forgot that the rich metadata, adaptive rate streaming and connection to other related information (e.g., IMDB) and services (e.g., buying a soundtrack at Amazon) makes me wonder why this is not offered by every service provider. 

As you can see, I am very excited about this – mainly because this technology is offered by Verimatrix and our good friends at RCDb. Read more here if you are as excited as I am. 

Hopefully, I saved you a long trip to Amsterdam although I cannot serve you virtual poffertjes (at least not in this decade). 

Let me know what you liked at IBC.

But in reality, these two worlds are really not exclusive as they might seem.

Some content may start as paid content, and later on may be distributed in the clear with commercials and eventually distributed freely. Other business models allow users to chose between paid but ad-free version or ad-supported version of the same content. Content providers or service operators are not likely to transcode each content for different distribution models if they can avoid it.

As a comment on Google’s apparent position here, I don’t see why an open source codec or open standard should be fundamentally incompatible with revenue generating services. This has been disproved by several standards organizations including MPEG, DVB or OMA, but that is a discussion for another day. The bottom line is that if valuable content will eventually be encoded and distributed using VP8, we’ll be able to protect it if the business model requires it (it is open source after all, isn’t it?) Read on NewTeeVee why open sourcing VP8 matters.

The other issue in debate is whether open source VP8 will stay free. It is unlikely that after a quarter of a century of digital video compression research, Google (or On2) would be able to come up with a codec that is of comparable quality as those developed by MPEG/ITU without infringing on anybody’s patents. If I remember correctly, Microsoft tried something similar with VC-1 and it did not work according to the original plan.

I don’t believe that any serious service provider will jump on the VP8 bandwagon without being able to accommodate all licensing fees into their business model upfront.  Maybe this will speed up MPEG’s effort to create a royalty-free version of MPEG codec, which will avoid splitting the pay-TV and free-TV worlds.

I guess we will wait and see . . .