Posted on April 21, 2008 by Mari Silbey
Last week Comcast introduced a new service called AnyRoom in its New Jersey market designed to let multiple set-tops in a home access the same VOD content. It’s not multi-room DVR, but it’s a good step on the road to cable-based, in-home television networking.
First the basics: Users of the AnyRoom feature can make a selection [...]
Filed under: Networks, VOD | 6 Comments »
Posted on March 23, 2008 by Mari Silbey
Even though Comcast has placed money on the Internet side of on-demand video delivery, it’s still banking on the success of traditional VOD. After promising at CES to offer more than 6,000 movies on demand by the end of the year, the operator just this past week announced some impressive stats to date:
Seven billion [...]
Filed under: Comcast, VOD | No Comments »
Posted on March 11, 2008 by Mari Silbey
It’s that time of year again. CBS is once again planning to stream March Madness games online for free throughout the NCAA tournament. In 2006, the first year CBS offered March Madness On Demand at no cost, the CBS.com site set a record for simultaneous online video streams at 268,000. In 2008 [...]
Filed under: Bandwidth, Internet, TV, VOD, Video | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 3, 2008 by Mari Silbey
Service providers operate their networks based on a series of calculations. Among the variables they consider is concurrency, or the number of subscribers likely to be tuned in or logged on at any given time. In recent modeling, cable operators have planned for roughly 10% concurrency with video and 1% concurrency with high-speed [...]
Filed under: Bandwidth, Cable, Comcast, Internet, VOD, Video | 2 Comments »
Posted on February 20, 2008 by Mari Silbey
Plenty of people are covering the death of HD DVD so I thought I’d take a different tack here. Listening to NPR last night I heard a story that played tape from an old, old interview with a Sony executive on Betamax. Yes, Beta tapes died a sad death much like the HD [...]
Filed under: HDTV, VOD | No Comments »
Posted on February 17, 2008 by Mari Silbey
This is my official, one-year-until-the-digital-TV transition post. Consider it part primer, part Motorola perspective.
Why are we having a digital TV transition?
The original impetus behind moving to all-digital television was a regulatory push to reclaim broadcast channels for public/civic use. However, with the rapid growth of HDTV, on-demand television and streaming video on the [...]
Filed under: Bandwidth, Cable, DTV, HDTV, Internet, Networks, TV, VOD | 1 Comment »
Posted on February 12, 2008 by Mari Silbey
EngadgetHD dug up a post recently from Rex Sorgatz on the first issue of Wired magazine. It’s a fantastic archeological dig, so if you have time, do read the whole piece.
The item I found most interesting was the reference to a feature article by Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte (yes, the Negroponte [...]
Filed under: HDTV, Internet, TV, VOD | No Comments »
Posted on February 11, 2008 by Mari Silbey
Get ready for a slew of DTV transition posts as we approach the one-year countdown. (I’ll have my own up soon enough.) In the meantime, however, there’s word out of Cox that the operator will continue offering analog signals until February 2012, three years after the official transition date in 2009. That’s [...]
Filed under: Bandwidth, Cable, Networks, Switched Digital, TV, VOD | No Comments »
Posted on February 5, 2008 by Mari Silbey
Advertisers got their money’s worth this year with the most watched Super Bowl ever. According to Nielsen, the Super Bowl averaged 97.5 million viewers throughout the game. Only the final episode of MASH beats that number in American television history.
However, the situation is more complicated than the Nielsen ratings suggest. [...]
Filed under: DVR, Internet, TV, VOD, Video | 1 Comment »
Posted on January 31, 2008 by Mari Silbey
Edge QAMs have been getting a fair bit of industry attention recently, not least of all because of the recent Kagan conference, “QAM Before the Storm”. (Still my favorite name for an event ever…) Some at the Kagan conference were predicting the near-term end of edge QAM devices given the coming shift from [...]
Filed under: Cable, Networks, Switched Digital, TV, VOD | No Comments »