Blog articles from 10/2010

The Time Warner Cable and ESPN TV Everywhere partnership will be the first big test of the stickiness of access to live sports in an authenticated service. We think that the cable operators' high-definition capabilities, growing VoD libraries, and aggregated live sports are among the chief weapons at their disposal to fend off cord-cutting. It will be quite interesting to see if TWC will report any figures on the usage of the ESPN content, as well as any impact this has on customer...

Kurt Scherf , VP, Principal Analyst, Parks Associates will be participating on the webcast, " Converged TV: Building the Social, Dynamic Video Platform " hosted by Multichannel News and sponsored by Motorola on Wednesday, October 27th at 2:00 PM EDT. With the next generation of television services, viewers will become doers. The fusion of TV with Internet and mobile applications, if done right, should greatly enhance engagement and interactivity. It's no longer just...

The bandwidth challenges inherent to today's mobile broadband services are well-reported, particularly with the heavy usage of AT&T's iPhone customers on its 3G network. Although mobile broadband network upgrades continue, operators are looking at other solutions to reduce network constraints. Wi-Fi is one such solution, and most of the activity has been focused on encouraging users to leverage the Wi-Fi connections on their smartphones along with the in-home access point (which is...

Yesterday's news highlighted what NDS was expecting to show at SCTE next week in terms of a residential gateway platform. Today, there is an article highlighting the UPC Horizon Connected Home Gateway, which is expected to deploy across UPC's European network beginning in 2011. The Horizon gateway will provide access for both broadband and pay-TV services, enable whole-home DVR, and allow any content stored on the home network (PCs and other storage devices) to be viewed on the...

Here's more evidence that the incumbent video infrastructure companies are quickly rolling the devleopment of solutions for multi-content and multi-platform delivery. On Wednesday, Alcatel-Lucent announced a strategic alliance program for the Velocix Digital Media Delivery Platform to ensure that service providers can benefit from a range of pre-integrated technology components to accelerate the deployment of multiscreen consumer solutions. Initial members of this alliance...

There are certainly synergies that exist between companies in the set-top box and residential gateway markets, and the acquisitions have followed, with a particular focus on the European market. First, there was NDS and Jungo back in late 2006. Pace Micro has been on a tear in 2010, acquiring both Bewan Systems and 2Wire. Of course, one cannot forget Technicolor, which brings requisite hardware, software, and content delivery to the table. Now, Netgem has confirmed that it is...

There have been a number of announcements this year regarding cable operators' push toward deploying customer premise equipment that takes on the functionality of the residential gateway, set-top boxes, media server, and manager of remote user interfaces. So far, I've seen news from Liberty Global, and NDS is preparing to introduce its version at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo next week. Demonstrations will include: * Secure end-to-end delivery of triple and quad play services from...

LOVEFiLM's streamed content (about 5,000 titles) has been available on Sony BRAVIA® and Samsung Internet @ TV HDTVs and Blu-ray players in the U.K.. Now, this content is available on PlayStation 3 game consoles , expanding LOVEFiLM's potential footprint to about three million homes. LOVEFiLM offers a subscription service starting from £5.99 (€6.80) a month. PlayStation users will be able to access the service via the console’s XMB menu system. Lovefilm is set to launch on...