Media Experiences 2 Go

On the heels of the HBO announcement earlier this month, there’s more news now that Starz Entertainment will use a Motorola encoding system for its upcoming new HD channels (Starz Comedy, Starz Edge and Starz Kids & Family). Specifically, the technology will support Starz’s planned migration from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4.
Why go MPEG-4? Roughly [...]

Filed under: Bandwidth, HDTV, Motorola News | 10 Comments »

Craig Matsumoto started a thread on a Light Reading message board that had me in hysterics. Every year public relations firms start pitching products in the summer to reporters who are doing research for holiday gift guide articles. (Yes, the lead time is long.) While the strategy makes perfect sense for publications [...]

Filed under: Fiber, HDTV, Video | No Comments »

Cable operators face a catch-22. To attract premium subscribers they have to sell broadband service on the merits of the rich, multimedia experiences that a high-speed connection provides. Unfortunately, to support those rich experiences, they have to hope that most people won’t be overzealous in using them.
Mark Cuban believes this means [...]

Filed under: Bandwidth, Cable, Fiber, Internet, Networks | 4 Comments »

An article in The New York Times a few days ago suggested that growth in the HDTV market may be slowing. Should producers and network operators be worried given their hyper-focus on HD content and services?
Nah.
First, as the Times article points out, prices on high-definition TV sets will continue to drop, with [...]

Filed under: HDTV | 2 Comments »

Ages ago I drafted a paper on DRM transcoding with the help of some of Motorola’s top experts on the subject. The basic premise of the paper is that transcoding is critical to breaking down the barriers that prevent consumers from moving content across devices and networks. Voila: seamless mobility.
Of course, [...]

Filed under: DRM, Mobile device, Networks, Video | No Comments »

Remember when I said we were about to hear a lot more about femtocells? Well In-Stat predicts there will be 101.5 million end-users worldwide within five years. You know once the analyst firms start putting out statistics that it’s just the start of the hype cycle.

Filed under: Fixed-Mobile Convergence, Mobile device, Wireless | 1 Comment »

Operators who made a firm commitment to go all-digital in the near future got special consideration from the FCC on CableCARD waiver requests. But there’s another reason to push digital penetration rates to 100%. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is now floating a proposal to mandate that cable companies transmit so-called “must carry” channels [...]

Filed under: Bandwidth, Cable, CableCARD, TV | 9 Comments »

A pair of articles in yesterday’s CTAM SmartBrief illustrates how far video-on-demand has come and how far it still has to go. The first is a USA Today article that reports on how RHI Entertainment will produce 24 made-for-TV movies exclusively for a VOD audience through mid-2008. This isn’t quite as good as [...]

Filed under: VOD | No Comments »

New reports on the Torrent Freak site suggest that Comcast is inhibiting certain P2P activities with traffic-shaping technology. I don’t find this terribly surprising, but it does make me wonder when we’ll hit the tipping point where access to P2P applications becomes a large enough consumer issue that ISPs have to address the issue [...]

Filed under: Bandwidth, Comcast, Internet | 1 Comment »

I’ve been wondering about cable digital subscriber numbers in the wake of the Seven-Oh-Seven deadline. Comcast had a major promotional push going on prior to the deadline, presumably in the hopes of clearing out its inventory of non-CableCARD set-tops. Did it pay off in digital subscribers? Yes, it did. In spades.
One [...]

Filed under: Cable, CableCARD, Comcast, Time Warner | No Comments »