The great debate surrounding the viability of premium Video on Demand (VoD) content continues. At this point, it seems we should move beyond the enabling regulations and technical obstacles surrounding premium VoD and instead concern ourselves with market dynamics – who might be the big winners and losers. Despite some changing dynamics in content licensing and security, technology is not the long pole in the tent any more, but rather licensing terms and subscriber adoption – at least for early adopters. And we are clearly still in the experimental phase of verifying if a home theater movie experience in a similar release window as theatrical release provides a viable business upside.

As IBC draws closer, we find ourselves reflecting on the trends that have been reinforced since IBC 2010, and anticipating the prevailing themes of the conversations at IBC 2011.

Since last year’s show, it seems the digital TV industry has entered a new period of pragmatism and commercial maturity. This feels like a welcome period of stabilization after the recent cycles of hype following OTT’s emergence as a viable new technical option for service delivery.

So if you’re in Amsterdam next month, drop by our stand, say hello and share your thoughts with us on the trends here and at @verimatrixinc that will define IBC 2011 and pave the way for the IBC 2012.

The early release window for premium VOD movies, which offers Hollywood content for home consumption while it is still showing at theaters, has been debated for many years. One technically interesting point for me is that operators often prefer server-side integration of watermarking. The tradeoff is whether the integration is done in the client device, or in the video server before delivery.

We recently announced the availability of our new StreamMark server-side watermarking solution, which we demonstrated at CableNET 2011. StreamMark has tremendous potential to help shape the market for premium video on demand (VoD) content. Yes, we realize early release windows and watermarking have been discussed, debated and hyped for many years. But premium VoD has been revitalized ever since the FCC’s ruling allowing selectable output control (SOC) for set-top boxes in the U.S.

The distinction between multi-screen TV and TV will eventually disappear as all video services inherently incorporate any device where we want to consume content. The challenge is to make multi-screen services more scalable, which requires advances in headends, networks, content rights and revenue protection.

What effect will the FCC’s decision on allowing selectable output control for set-top boxes? A surge of interest in forensic watermarking for home theater on demand release windows.

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 [...]

The promise of video watermarking has always been alluring to technologists and content owners. They like the idea of embedding an invisible forensic mark on valuable content in order to protect assets and possibly catch the bad guys. And with high-profile success stories like the Academy Awards busts on pirated screener copies traced using forensic [...]