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A recent interview with Ken Lowe, VP of Strategic Marketing for Sigma Designs. Ken addressed a variety of topics concerning Blu-ray, the IPTV marketplace over the next couple of years as well as competition from Broadcom, IP and the companies recent financial performance.
Interview with Gary Croke, Director of marketing, for Symmetricom's QoE Assurance Division. Gary spoke to the test measurement market specific to IPTV content delivery and quality issues facing Telco's and Cable operator's. Interview with Gary
IPTV Video Quality Study
(click on image below for slideshow)
With the announcement that Nokia has teamed with Spike Lee to create a series of shorts for the UGC community is certainly a positive step for the handset maker seeking to extend into more diverse markets.
Certainly, UGC is huge and the goal of converting millions of eyeballs into dollars has been Holy Grail for YouTube and a slew of smaller companies. That Nokia is using their platforms; I gather the N95 along with a name director is certainly a good marketing strategy. Certainly, this is not the first company to seek to work from the top down.
© The New York Times
According to Mr. Lee who has admitted to being technologically challenged said, "I'm interested because it's a great collaborative effort," Mr. Lee said. "Within five years, new movies will be made with devices like these."
I agree, but made by whom? A couple of years back Nokia had what I thought a killer platform for production, namely the N93 that unfortunately did not gain traction as was discontinued. While not consumer friendly enough, an updated version of the N93 would make a great little platform for Indie Producers for shorts, or even perhaps as Second unit camera for some projects.
Continue reading "Nokia and Spike Lee Target UGC, What about Indie Producers?" »
Solaiemes is a mobile start-up focused on delivering live handset to web experiences, this via their web page widget pushed through custom configured servers. Currently, only operating in Europe, they are positioning themselves for the U.S when upstream speeds improve beyond 64 kbps. They see market opportunities in law enforcement and real estate however, other ideas would certainly develop. I spoke with Juan Mateu, CEO from their offices in Madrid where he provided a real time demo of their platform mobile section.
Overview of the company
(click on image below for slideshow)
I spoke with Anthony C. Naughtin, President and CEO of GridNetworks about his company which is a hybrid between a traditional peer-to-peer and CDN provider. Aside from the mystery surrounding that shrouded Cisco as an investor, what is notable but not available today is the integration of their GridCast Connector software sitting as an application layer or plug-in on top of cable boxes and other Internet appliances. If the company is going to scale to "Nielsen-sized audiences," as Tony has alluded to, the company will need to move swiftly to embed in devices while pushing the limits of HD, i.e. beyond 720p to the home.
With a Series B round of financing planned for late 2008, the company will ad to it's coffers of 9.5 billion from their first round, their burn rate however, could be significant especially as they have to move on several fronts at once.
New York, NY - (April 9th 2008) IpTV Evangelist today launched its production services division geared towards companies in the ITV and IPTV space.
With ITV and IPTV companies, seeking to enhance market share the addition of on-line video demos will break through the static giving potential customers compelling video examples as soon as they enter the company's site.
IpTVe will offer a wide range of production services in both SD and HD delivery, such as
Principals Gilbert B. Hammer, Producer/Director of Photography and Adrian Smith, Director of Client Services are both Television veterans each with twenty years in the Broadcast and Corporate video space and has studio space with Fiber connectivity, located in Downtown Manhattan.
In addition, IpTVe is has production personnel located around the country to help offset travel expenses.
For more information, please contact IpTVe, or
Bill Lessard
PRwithBrains
914.476.6089
wlessard@prwithbrains.com
IPTV Evangelist's charter has been to bring our writers diverse slant about the IPTV and ITV markets to our reader's and our name reflected this public familiarity. As some had been fierce in their opposition to this sandbox approach, or (it takes a village) or (People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?)
Anyway, we decided to update our logo to reflect both delivery methods. After all, all video content traverses over Ip in some form, we are most interested in how people create it and use it when it gets where it's going and that's no joke...
Having tested the technical quality and transport of Hulu content, both in SD and HD, I was satisfied with SD delivery and quality but unsatisfied with HD, this due to too much shuttering of the 1280x720 video, quality was good.
On too UI. The experience was as I have read elsewhere, clean and easy to navigate. Logical with lists by; Popular movies, popular movie clips, Alphabetical, Genre and Studio, see on slides below.
Hulu, the joint venture site of NBC Universal and News Corporation's online video launched today. As listed on their blog, "Today we are excited to leave our private beta and open Hulu.com to everyone in the U.S."
So what is the Hulu experience? That depends on your expectations and starting point. I'm going to start with the technical experience since that is how I approached deconstructing the site.
Guy Kawasaki sat down with Steve Ballmer at Mix 2008 conference and asked the soft ball, why Microsoft wanted to purchase Yahoo!. Ballmer said it was a zero sum game and that on-line advertising is key and search is part of that equation, hence the need to accelerate the process of their underdog status in that space.
In addition, Ballmer spoke about Facebook, the pitch for getting people to work at Microsoft and other parts of the company. There was also a Q&A portion.
With the news last month that Ensequence signed a ten year deal with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) following the recent win of Blue-ray over the HD DVD format, the company is in a hot position to extend their on-Q Create suite for Blu-ray Java (BD-J) for platform development.
While the Java (no pun) portion of BD-J offers increased interactivity options for developers, the learning curve could pose an obstacle for some and slow roll-out of platforms. Ensequence claims to have removed this hurtle with their software authoring tool which affords a drag and drop metaphor and is fully compatible with Photoshop, the industry standard for graphics development.
With all the turmoil going on with Yahoo! and if/should they become part of Microsoft, one area should not be overlooked for interesting content, Tech Ticker.
Part of their comprehensive Finance section, Tech Ticker is a video channel of interviews and stories relating to the topic. There are a few users tools for voting (their version of Digg) as well as the embed code, IM, bookmark features.
For those not familiar Tech Ticker is the re-birth of their innovative FinanceVision platform of 2000 which, was the first ITV live newscast of its day, see image below.
FinanceVision 2000
Also see: http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2006/02/do_you_remember_yahoo_financevision.html
In a long anticipated move Apple computers made their iPhone platform available for third-party development, with the SDK available for a $99.00 fee for those creating "free" and commercial applications for the public. Enterprise developers will pay $299.00 for the ability to create proprietary, in-house applications. Personally, if I am spending $100.00 to develop an application, I am not going to create something free, but that is just me.
Users will be able to obtain applications exclusively through a new service on all iPhones called the Apps Store. Apple will also charge 30% of the sale price, a move that may discourage some developers of smaller or niche apps.
Sandisk sent the 4GB version of their Sansa Take TV system for us to look at. With solutions from Netflix and others to integrate hardware into sets, the Take TV system is a current solution for moving video content from your computer to your large screen. With a price of about $100.00 for the 4GB module, the barrier for acceptance is low.
With Television viewing declining in hours watched, Nielsen needs to gather viewing habits beyond their tradition base to include Web and mobile devices. A problem is while people are ok with a downstream device monitoring of their habits it is quite another kettle of fish when it comes to interactive viewing choices.
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