It was a pleasure to host our EMEA Autumn Summit this year near our new Munich office during Oktoberfest. Our customers and ecosystem partners attended the 2-day workshop to network with our combined European-based team and senior executives, as well as gain a full understanding of the direction of our VCAS security architecture. We laid [...]

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.

An increased number of portable and mobile devices are driving consumer interest in video on the go. Consumers are demanding access to preferred content across devices, anywhere and anytime. However, for service providers and content owners to be able to provide these services in a profitable manner, the content must first be secure. In addition, as new revenue models develop, the content protection must offer increased flexibility and the ability to follow complex rules. This webinar explores the new requirements for effective rights management and content protection in a multiplatform world.

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.

We recognize that we are still in the early days of developing the business environment for adaptive rate streaming and OTT video services – which is why we are organizing the Capitalizing on OTT Breakfast Forum the morning of March 22 just down from the IP&TV World Forum.

And who already has access to high-quality content and conditional access (CA) / digital rights management (DRM) systems in place? Digital TV operators. We believe the cable, satellite and IPTV operators that already have the rights to broadcast premium content are in the cat bird seat to offer the best live mobile TV experience.

In our opinion, 2010 has been the year of over-the-top (OTT) applications and no technology has done more for the deployment of OTT service delivery models than adaptive rate streaming (ARS). We would even venture to claim that adaptive rate streaming has been one of the most influential technologies of 2010.

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 [...]

The standardization and deployment of HTTP-based adaptive rate streaming is likely to alter the current digital TV framework of managed network vs. Internet delivery.  We feel the open approach of Apple’s version of HTTP streaming and the popularity of the iPhone and iPad along with its growing list of video-based apps, has become a major [...]

Videonet’s latest industry report, “Supporting the ‘any screen, anywhere’ video consumer,” provides an in-depth exploration of current whole home video approaches available as they are developing. One choice is to to deploy a powerful media gateway that repurposes content for various consumption models in the home network. Another option being aggressively promoted is to deliver traditional digital TV services via the ‘cloud,’ or a network-centric approach, in parallel with a variety of over-the-top services that have the right format, resolution and DRM to match the devices being used.