IBC: The Place to Be in Early September
Colin Dixon, Senior Partner
September 13, 2009
Over the years, we have found that the IBC show in Amsterdam provides a wonderful venue for catching up on the latest and greatest in the digital video world. Unlike the sprawling vastness of the Las Vegas convention center, the RAI provides a more intimate atmosphere for less harried conversations with vendors. From the many briefings we had today, Saturday, here are a couple of things that stood out from the crowd.
Sonic Does Blu-Ray
Sonic demonstrated its end-to-end Blu-Ray production solutions with multiple products for every size production house. Chris Neeley, VP of European Ops, also told us that Sonic-CinemaNow was beefing up its HD distribution chops. Their CineVision Adaptive HD Video encoding system now allows CinemaNow to deliver in HD to any connected CE device.
But what caught our eye was the possibility for Sonic to dominate the Internet distribution of video to Blu-Ray players. We expect this Christmas to be a big year for Blu-Ray players with prices dipping into the $150 region. Also, pretty much all the players are now broadband enabled to support BD Live, the Blu-Ray disc connected technology. But manufacturers aren’t just supporting BD Live. They’re beginning to add Internet Video clients such as NetFlix and, well, CinemaNow as well. As we said in our latest OTT report, we believe that Blu-Ray players will be the dominant platform for Internet Video delivery to the TV by 2014. Sonic has the production capabilities for the discs and the means of delivering high quality video over the Internet to the players via CinemaNow. They could become the default video delivery mechanism to players and, in the process, a dominant force in the delivery of Internet video to the television! This is definitely something to keep an eye on over the coming years.
Miniweb's Infinite Playlist
At their tiny pod in the IPTV Zone Ian Valentine and Andrew Carver, the management muscle of Miniweb, were demonstrating the Miniweb Interactive Services platform. Using an Intel CE3100 powered STB, the newly ported client looked slick and smooth sliding its translucent menus from screen left, right and bottom. Also, the Blinkx integration is complete and has helped deliver some powerful new features.
The client really does an outstanding job of leveraging the Internet to enhance the video that’s playing on the TV. For example, when you’re watching a BBC channel and you pop out the right hand menu it is customized for the BBC. You can get show information; find out what’s coming up on that channel and more. Watch an Internet video from Blinkx and the right hand menu is customized for Blinkx.
Another example of this integration is the search function. The search proceeds fairly normally providing a list of suggested videos from which you can select. Once you pick one and start watching it the system picks other videos like it and automatically creates a playlist of them. If you do nothing else, each of these videos will play sequentially. It’s like having a custom channel on everything that you search for!
This approach is leveraged again when you select “favorites” from the left-hand menu. The system has been quietly building a profile of your likes and dislikes. When you select “favorites” it does a custom search based on these preferences and suggests a bunch of videos for you to watch. Select one and once again it builds a playlist for you. It might be interesting to combine Miniweb’s “favorites” with the Orca “I’m Bored” social feature we talked about yesterday.
Did you see something you liked at the IBC show this year? Please add your comment to this blog.
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