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 [...]

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 [...]