Mixed Signals
Jimmy Schaeffler, chairman and CSO of The Carmel Group, writes about the convergence of pay television and other industry developments.
OVD Stakeholders in OTT-Land: Internet, Mobile and Online Video Magic
Four decades ago, when broadcasters began to really have to deal seriously with cable operators as rival forms of video distributors, most observers felt the promise (or threat) of cable change was pretty obvious. Jump forward about a decade, and the threat or change that was represented by Direct Broadcast Satellites (DBS), was in a similar category: most who knew the industry suspected it made a ...... Read More
Comments (0)OTTCon 2012: Santayana and Learning From The Past?
It’s been more than a decade since I saw, in person, the former head of and founder of ReplayTV. His name is Anthony Wood, and he used to attend and speak at conferences produced by my company, The Carmel Group. We had fun reminiscing recently for a few precious moments at the 3d annual OTT Con in Santa Clara, Calif., from March 20-21 Yet, it is fascinating to note that Wood today is not so ...... Read More
Comments (1)Satellite 2012: OTT-Broadband TV Is Here, What's Next?
My 20th Satellite Name-The-Year event just came and went in Washington, DC, March 14-16. And thus far, 2012 is already clearly a year of yearning for the world’s satellite providers. They yearn for the good old times of the past, but, more importantly, they yearn for a clearer future. That is because on the business-to-business side, terrestrial fiber threatens to take business away in the ...... Read More
Comments (1)Digital Signage Exposition 2012: Growth Industry
As part of a recent client business plan - written for a client in the laundromat business, called Clean View Media Network (CVMN), wishing to use digital signage in dryer doors — we ran across a graphic that told so much about where the digital signage industry is today (and will be tomorrow). The graphic compared the laundromat industry’s rating of “flat”, to that of ...... Read More
Comments (0)CalPlug 2012: Looking Entirely Differently at Electricity and Set-top Boxes
A handful of weeks ago, I was asked to serve on an “expert panel” at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) covering the topic of America’s set-top pay TV boxes (STBs). The event was called “CalPlug,” this iteration focused almost primarily on the topic of saving and using less electrical energy in the hundreds of millions of STBs that frequent, indeed, proli ...... Read More
Comments (2)Ubiquitous Video: Everything, to Everyone, Always
Whether it’s “TV Everywhere,” or something as eye-popping and catchy, the real idea of video today, and the real video-TV revolution, is based on the idea of “choice,” and choice figuratively on steroids. Another term I like for this change is “Ubiquitous Video.” Putting credit squarely at the feet of Eddy Hartenstein and Bill Butterworth of DirecTV ...... Read More
Comments (1)With A Little Help From My Friends
At the 2011 CES in Las Vegas, I wrote for Multichannel News about four Ts: tablets, talks, travel, and thin TVs. The tablets and thin TVs topic was the obvious burgeoning development of these set of stunning new contraptions that bring dreams to life. Travel was a frustration with the difficulty getting from A to B in Sin City, and all the time wasted doing that. And the talks were a reminder of w ...... Read More
Comments (2)The Holy Alliance of Digital Signage and Pay TV: Near or Far Away?
Two digital signage conferences last month in New York City provided some fascinating observations about 1) the future of digital signage, and 2) digital signage’s future relative to the broadcast and pay TV business. Specifically, as it relates to the latter observation, is the idea that more and more broadcasters and pay TV operators dip a toe into the waters of digital signage, mostly lo ...... Read More
Comments (2)SatCon 2011: More Mixed Signals
‘Tis the season for conferences. Three weeks ago, it was the TV Next Conference in San Jose, with a core focus on Over-the Top (OTT) on line video models. This past week, in New York City, I attended the SatCon event of a couple days at the Javits Convention Center. The reason I titled this week’s review of SatCon “More Mixed Signals,” is because visit after visit to Sa ...... Read More
Comments (1)TV Next Conference 2011: The OTTs Are Coming, The OTTs Are Coming!
From Oct. 4-5, in San Jose, Calif., together with about 200 others, I attended a well run and very informative telecom conference called TV Next. TV Next is put on by Greg Fawson and his Jordan, Utah- and Berlin, Germany-based XMedia Research company. Its title replaces that of the same basic conference last year, called Set-Top Box 2010, which is quite fitting, because the real changes in TV toda ...... Read More
Comments (1)TV and The SFO International Airport: A Rare New Exhibit
In my TV consulting business, I travel a lot, I suppose, and that travel opens a lot of new things to me, for which I am grateful. Yet, on the other hand, I’ll always recall how my father used to lament the volume of his travel, noting “one hotel gets to looking just like another one.” The late Jim Croce could probably do something with the irony of this comparison. Recently, ...... Read More
Comments (0)MVPD+TV Change=OTT and The Third Perfect Storm
During the past 70 years of television, broadcasters have been challenged by new forms of distribution in two distinct time periods: the cable era of the 60s and 70s, and the satellite era of the 80s and 90s. These once-nascent distribution technologies, each one with one or two defining leaders using their legal strength to challenge the broadcasters, ended up dramatically changing the landscape ...... Read More
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