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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

At the recent Television 3.0 conference in Los Angeles, I was pleased to find some fresh and interesting perspectives on mobile TV from execs at CBS Interactive and their mobile TV partner Transpera. They set out to dispel some commonly held “truths” regarding behavior on consuming mobile TV based on current research.  For me, it [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

IBC has always been a platform for showcasing the next big thing in pay TV. Operators come to hear about the latest technology platforms and get a sense of what is real and what is purely in the demo stage. Because of the innovation explosion that has occurred in this industry over the past several [...]