Archive for the ‘Steve Christian’ Category

The Great Web Video Debate

It seems there is a bit of a new storm brewing around Apple devices and their support for Flash plug-ins - especially around video support on the new iPad. Even one of our favorite and very pithy analysts Peter White is weighing in.
It would seem that it’s about time that someone called Adobe’s bluff here! This might be construed as [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

See Dubai, See the Future of TV

I can’t help but draw a parallel between the jaw-dropping architecture that characterizes the Dubai skyline and the TV systems of the near future contemplated by some of the region’s more ambitious pay-TV operators.  The IPTV World Forum meeting here this week helped to label the Middle East and Africa as potentially one of the most dynamic markets in the [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

TeliaSonera Honored

Our warmest congratulations goes to Per-Ola Wester of TeliaSonera for his place on the Euro50 list by Digital TV Europe. Per-Ola has been an instrumental leader of the hugely successful IPTV system deployment at TeliaSonera. He has also been shortlisted for the “Technology Leader” of the year award.
TeliaSonera is a notable customer for Verimatrix not only due to the highly effective technology integration [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Sacred Cows and the New Pay-TV Marketplace

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 [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

An Alternate Reality?

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 [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

STB 2009 and MultiRights

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 [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

A New Competitor for Pay-TV Services?

The word is out on a new Google/YouTube plan to expand their influence on the video world.
But can the pioneer of user generated content and viral video marketing really make the transition to a paid content provider? It seems to me that the shift may be challenging from a technical standpoint as well as that [...]

Read the rest of this entry »