One of the themes at NAB 2013 was high efficiency video codecs. I spoke with several vendors, including upLynk and Harmonic, claiming that we would not have to wait very long to begin to reap the benefits of HEVC/h.265 technology.
Fans of “All My children†and “One Life to Live†have discovered—unequivocally—that there is life after death… and that it happens online. The two ABC soap opera, which had entertained millions of middle-of-the-afternoon drama fans for decades, met their untidy ends (neither of the shows had the time to wrap up the multiple plot lines […]
Indulge me for a moment. This weekend is the NFL Draft… an annual rite of passage for hundreds—if not thousands—of pro football hopefuls. ESPN has made it easier than even to follow each–agonizingly slow—selection. The draft is live on ESPN through the final pick around 7:30 p.m. Saturday. It’s being—for the first time ever–streamed live […]
See that bright light in the east? The sun? No. It’s the glow from Madison Avenue, where execs are smiling en masse at the latest comScore Video Metrix report that shows video ad views surged to a record high 13.2 billion in March. Meanwhile, the usual suspects made up the top video properties in the […]
Pyramid Research is out with a report that highlights mobile revenue growth in emerging markets regardless of what the rest of the global economy look like, forecasting that with economic growth projected to quintuple in those markets compared to developed markets, mobile will be the easiest tagalong. In its “Top Trends in the Global Communications†[…]
CBC, a national broadcaster in Canada, has strategically collaborated with Conviva to incorporate Conviva’s anticipatory optimization and per-viewer performance analytics.
The Provo Municipal Council has agreed to accept Google’s $1 payment, for the city’s iProvo fiber-optic network, clearing the way for the muni-fiber network to transition to Google Fiber, making Provo the third city to get the 1 Gbps Internet and pay-TV service. Google will lease the network to the city for free for the […]
This week is a good one to be a Netflix (NFLX) shareholder: Its earnings report showed 1Q earnings per share topped estimates (31 cents versus consensus 20 cents), revenues came in on target ($1.02 billion for the quarter), and earnings guidance for the second quarter is, in the best case scenario, nearly 50 percent above […]
With a little more space and some extra time, this would be a great opportunity to launch into a discussion about the Boston Tea Party, how the Sons of Liberty action against British tax policy helped launch the American Revolution, and how Aereo’s announcement today that it would be expanding its service into the Boston […]
U.S. broadband connection speeds now average better than 7.4 Mbps, Akamai today said in its Q4 State of the Internet Report, that’s more than 25 percent faster than average connection speeds nationwide were a year ago, but still leaves the United States eighth in the global rankings behind South Korea (14 Mbps), Japan (10.8 Mbps), […]
The key part of the upLynk solution is that is cost-effective for anybody of any size. When you have a customer like Disney that has a massive operation that you’re trying to work with, keeping costs low is incredibly important for them.
Latin America is poised to add 19 million new satellite-TV households by 2018, outpacing cable, which is expected to add about 14 million new digital household over the same period. That’s according to a new report from Digital TV Research, which goes on to say that much of the growth is coming from lower-cost and […]
Some of you may be bleary-eyed this morning after a weekend of intense Netflix viewing. The company rolled out its latest batch of original content, the supernatural thriller “Hemlock Grove.†All 13 episodes of the show were made available at once on Saturday, a la “Lilyhammer†and “House of Cards,†guaranteeing at least some Netflix […]
Social TV will bring content providers, TV networks, multichannel operators, and advertisers opportunity and challenges, according to new research. The impact of social TV already is changing the way users view TV, moving it from “a passive consumption medium to a new kind of community experience, in which millions of Americans gather around the digital […]
Hulu’s original content play has become more animated, as it announced a new, 13-week series starring Eva Longora—she of “Desperate Housewives†fame—as a record exec who moves to suburbia to give motherhood a try. The flip? It’s a cartoon, and Longora will provide the voice for Rudi Wilson in “Mother Up!†The show debuts this […]
It seemed as if only months ago Google Fiber was being classed as “an experiment†by many of the folks who supposedly know about this space. The rollout in Kansas City was labeled as everything from a ploy by Google to put pressure on other broadband providers to pony up and improve their speed and […]
They’re b-a-a-a-c-k. In case you were worried that broadcasters were planning to fold up their tents and let Aereo walk away with a clean court win… fear not. Claiming that an appeals court decision not to shut down the start up that uses tiny antennas to stream over-the-air content to consumers in New York City […]
UltraViolet, which struggled to get off the ground with consumers in the United States who said it was confusing to register with and use, is getting a similar reaction in Great Britain, where satellite operator BSkyB is calling for it to be simpler and more customer focused. Ian Lewis, director of Sky Movies and Sky […]
With pay-TV providers continuing to lose subscribers to over-the-top offerings like Netflix and Hulu, the question in the C-suite has to be “How do we keep/get back those former subscribers †Turns out, that’s a pretty simple proposition: Bribe them. New research posits that 44 percent of customers who re-subscribed to pay-TV services in the […]
