Last weekend at IBC there was a raft of announcements around multi-screen video services. In particular, the major technology and solutions providers want MVPDs to help extend TV Everywhere (TVE) services to every screen a subscriber owns. Two such announcements came from Cisco and Ericsson.
Cisco announced that Korea Telecom would be using VideoScape to provide "n-screen" services to KT's 16M mobile, 7.6M broadband, and 2.5M IPTV customers. Cisco also announced that Videoscape would support "one source, multi-use," thus allowing a single version of a video to be delivered for use in multiple formats.
Ericsson announced a multi-screen encoding platform that can deliver over both managed and unmanaged networks. The hardware/software solution is capable of delivering h.264 video in many transport formats including MPEG Dash and HLS. Ericsson also announced that Chunghwa Telecom would be deploying the multi-screen solution to its 900,000 customers.
These were just a few of the many such show announcements that highlight the growing importance of broadband and wireless networks in the delivery of television services. Yet they also point to a troubling issue for MVPDs. There is a growing acceptance - implicitly assumed rather than explicitly stated - among the media technology and creation community that cable, satellite, and telco TV represent a legacy video delivery mechanism and that the Internet is the future. Hence the focus of all concerned on innovation in Internet technology and services; for when we speak of multi-screen delivery, we mean Internet-connected screens. With all this energy focused on the Internet, the normally slow pace of innovation in managed networks has slowed even further. And this could make the ascendency of online in media delivery a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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