All things digital

IPTV and BroadbandTV: Herve interviewed on KPBS San Diego

KPBS San Diego, an affiliate of NR, was kind enough to invite me to speak on their show "These Days" which airs daily, hosted by Tom Fudge. You can find details about this program here. The page includes the MP3 file of the segment, and you can also download it here:  Download news.mediaplayer.m3u
(c) 2005 anc courtesy KPBS San Diego

Herve speaking at the UBS November Conference

At the invitation of UBS Securities, I will participate in a panel about IPTV at the November 2005 UBS Global Communications Conference. Details can be found on the events pages of the UBS website. The event will be held in New-York City from NOv 15th to 17th, 2005.
The event flyer can be downloaded here:Download glbl_comm_std.pdf

Opinion Piece: too many IPTV STB offerings

The Diffusion Group published an opinion piece I write this past August about the (high) number of set-top box vendors and offerings in the IPTV market. You can read this article here.

Marketing a Set Top Box "Product" is not enough: with the advent of Linux, the use of DSP based chipsets, and the use of IP (over Ethernet), many manufacturers can come up with a "pre-production" prototype.
It is another matter to get this product integrated in a real network. Find out why with my Q2 IPTV report available from the Diffusion Group.

IBC 2005

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.

Opinion Piece: Time to Rethink the US TelcoTV

I wrote earlier this June 2005 an "Opinion Piece" published by the Diffusion Group. You can read the whole article here on the website of The Diffusion Group, an Austin, TX based market research company.

This piece spurred a whole slew of other articles questioning how quickly the deployment and integration of the SBC IPTV platform would go. Moshe Lichtman defended Microsoft in a press conference whose transcript is here. UBS Securities later announced that they did not see the SBC deployment start in earnest until 2006.
SBC COO later acknowledged that integration and scalability are issues, in a press interview with USA Today. Of course they are.
If you want to read more about why, check my IPTV Q2 2005 Report available from TDG.