The stats on Facebook usage are jaw-dropping, with over 900m registered users, over 500m of whom visit daily. For many of those users, Facebook is the internet. It’s the place they go to connect, to communicate, to share and – increasingly – to spend time consuming content. Much of that content – photos and status updates – is user-generated, but in terms of time spent and revenue generated, the importance of professionally created content, notably social gaming, cannot be overlooked. And by virtue of its scale, Facebook is becoming an important global platform for more traditional media content such as music and video. Yet attempts to charge users for such content have so far failed to gain traction.
Thierry Dupont is telecom project manager for TDF Group, the largest broadcast network operator in Europe with 11,000 sites. Ahead of his speaking role at the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain, we speak to him about the impact of LTE on TDF’s operations.
As always Informa’s analyst team was out in force at this year’s IP&TV World Forum – the last IP&TV World Forum, it turns out, as the show re-brands to TV Connect for 2013 and beyond. This year’s show was certainly bigger and brasher than previous years (exhibit a: the Red Bull F1 car on the upper floor) and most of the conversations we had showed companies in bullish mood about future opportunities.
Pay-TV vendors received another major shock this week as Cisco, one of the foremost providers of telecoms infrastructure, bought NDS, a leading middleware and CAS provider.
Chris Koopmans, chief operating officer at Bytemobile, explains the growing importance for operators to support video content and shed lights on how consumer behaviour is shaping the market.
Luke Kennedy, product and sales director of VisionIPTV, talks about his company’s CDN, used to deliver content to mobile devices.
Somewhat ironically I had only just returned home from the Content Delivery Networks Asia 2012 conference in Hong Kong – where telco CDN’s were touted as the solution to the great telco versus OTT battle – when I read that Korean market giant KT had decided to cut off access for OTT content for Samsung’s connected TV’s using its broadband network.
Today’s news – that the BBC’s iPlayer, its market-shaping catch-up service, will now be available on TV to subscribers of Sky – is not without irony, given the steady stream of anti-BBC spin we’ve heard from the pay-TV operator (and its newspaper siblings) over the years. Neutral observers of the two UK media giants are more used to seeing them slug it out, like Waldorf and Stadtler, only without the affection.
Sky, the UK TV broadcaster and ISP has announced that it is adding a fibre broadband product to its internet packages, while also for the first time offering an á la carte internet TV service to compete with UK newcomer Netflix.
Sky’s fibre service, based on the UK incumbent BT’s wholesale network, will offer download speed of 40Mb at a cost of £20 a month, undercutting BT. Sky said that the fibre package would be available to 30 per cent of UK homes, and that this would increase in line with BT’s fibre rollout.
Informa has long believed that the winning video platform will be the one that most conveniently blends a mix of Live TV and OTT into one easy-to-use package for consumers. Conventional logic has always been that this would either come from one of four places: a Pay TV provider, one of the big CE OEMs, Apple or Google. These players are the ones with the clout required to both secure content deals, and to pull off the significant technical integration such a play would require. But at CES, the most compelling vision of this future came from a much more unlikely source: Boxee.
A step in the right direction but does it go far enough?
Sharing an allowance among family members is one ...
I agree with Dan about this being a excellent read, and that QNX is not well known but sooner or ...
Excellent read with some actual facts compared to the hack journalist/bloggers on the interest. Many don't understand what QNX ...
The main issue with Telenor is that whether they made underhand payments to ge the licenses. If they did, then ...
Over The Top providers have become the staple wildcard in almost any sector set on a collision path with mobile. By and large they are very good at what they do: connecting a user with their chosen content or service by whatever means available.
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