IBC 2005 attendance was up 10% this year - a sign that maybe we have hit the bottom of the curve in digital TV industry CAPEX (and marketing / travel budget)?
Three main trends retained my attention this year:
(1) HDTV - this is where the action is, the investment flowing, and the actual operational deployment activities are going. With major European brobadcasters (like SKY) having announced their path to HDTV, the dices are rolling on the table, and every operator is now embarked on this race to video quality and HDTV.
(2) Mobile Video - still in the phase of testing and experimentation, it retains the attention of many operators and equipment vendors. The issues being tackled right now are: (i) spectrum and bandwidth requirements and availability, and roadmap to scale; (ii) video compression bandwidth requirements and video image quality, and the respective trade-offs between the two; (iii) early thoughts and acceptable business models (whill the consumer be there, and pay, and if yes, how, and what for?
(3) IPTV - well, this category wins the "Hype prize". Everybody, from service operators to equipment vendors and system integrators, had an IPTV logo or mention on their booth. Indicative of an early market phase: surely - market positions are wide open for competition. We have only seen the first implementation wave and architectures; cost reduction and chipset integration is at the first generation only. Little by little, we will be able to measure the growing maturity of the IPTV market as directly and inversely proportional to the number of IPTV logos on IBC booths.
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