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.

For one, there is very little 3D content and little commitment to produce more. I heard a statistic that I can’t prove, but sounds about right: there is a total of 120 hours of 3D television programming in the world. And one reason that Hollywood is willing to invest so much in experiences like Avatar is to bring new life to the theater release window. In other words, to make 3D an experience you won’t have at home. It seems logical for them to hang on to that distinctive advantage as long as possible before making the same content available at home.

And of course, there are a lot of people who just got “spousal approval” for an HD flat screen and they aren’t likely to head back to Costco for a replacement technology any time soon. 

Is seems like there is at least a possibility of a HD-DVD vs. BluRay style overhang in 3D technology as well.  We are seeing competing standards from organizations like CEA and SMPTE, plus the announcements from Panasonic about displaying 3D TV images at 1080p along with a Blu-ray disc player supporting the same resolution. The standards battles that are upon us will surely slow down development.  Peter White of Rethink Researchwrote a great piece on the topic in the latest Faultline, 3D’s cold shower – 3D Standards merely sub-standard. Check it out. 

Speaking of Blu-ray players . . . one thing that struck me at CES was that the most promoted feature of new Blu-ray players has nothing to do with playing Blu-ray discs!  Instead, there seems to be a race to collect box-top logos for internet delivered video services like Netflix. 

Since Blu-ray is all about the quality of the picture and streaming video is all about easy and direct access to content, it will be interesting to see how consumers choose.  If convenience trumps quality, it could be fatal for Blu-ray discs. Do you agree? 

Please come visit us at CSTB 2010in Moscow, Feb. 2-4.  Our very own Steve Oetegenn will be presenting on, “Emerging Delivery Technologies that Can Enhance your Business Model.”