Another erratic take on the exciting world of Enterprise Video!!  Read how I predicted trends that came to fruition, the right and wrong of how 2009 became a “banner” year for our industry in the Enterprise:

2009 - A Banner Year

The basic concept most enterprise organizations fail to acknowledge is that, as with any documentation or resource they use to communicate or to perform the organization’s day-to-day business, streaming media is in itself a digital record, and it is critical content that needs to be archived and kept relevant for future business efforts. And with media assets that bring to life the spirit of an all-staff meeting or that show a sales team how dynamic a speaker was when presenting a product or a service to a new prospect, we have the essence and the spirit of that success to reflect and build on. It’s also where we can evaluate our flaws in brilliant color and sound with supporting materials, feedback, and relevant metrics.

Read full article here

Blockbuster shares spiked today according to a report sent out by TheStreet.com.  Shares of Blockbuster were rallying 9.3% to 80 cents, and TiVo was rising 2% to $7.12. Shares of Netflix, meanwhile, were down 2.9% to $42.18. (Change: -2.39 | -5.50%)

TiVo HEART Blockbuster

Yesterday, a Press Release was issued by Blockbuster Corporate that announced that they will make on-demand videos available to TiVo users in an apparent attempt to compete with NetFlix, in the wake of issues surrounding NetFlix’s “Watch Now” service, which they say stems from ISP throttling, in home congestion, MAC/PC and general connectivity issues, but I personally don’t like Silverlight as a plug in, especially since there is no elegant roll-back option once installed, and it really is a pain in the rear to get into the various browsers I use in the first place.  (Just take a look at the Installation Forum for Microsoft Silverlight!)

The Blockbuster on-demand service “will be integrated into TiVo Series2™, Series3™, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL DVRs. The move by two leaders in home entertainment will make it even easier for all broadband connected TiVo subscribers to download Blockbuster’s content and enjoy a complete television entertainment experience on their individual schedules using TiVo, the best and most comprehensive single solution for delivery and simple, intuitive navigation of broadband, broadcast, and cable content – all from one remote control.”

The release goes on to say, “TiVo DVRs will be sold at thousands of Blockbuster® stores nationwide as well as online at blockbuster.com, giving both companies new distribution outlets and putting TiVo DVRs and BLOCKBUSTER OnDemand front and center of where video shopping takes place. Additionally, the companies will implement a cross-marketing campaign.”

What do you think???  Comment now!

The DTV Transition that premiered in Wilmington, North Carolina was the first DTV Test Pilot Program in which Analog Broadcasts ended on September 8, 2008.

According to the news releases, calls to the support hot line were primarily from individuals who did not read the instructions that came with their converter box. Ahhh, progress! Make your comments and take the on-line poll now. How will this effect the industry?  Read the official report

I mentioned on LinkedIn status that I had just completed the editing of this video – what do you think?

[kyte.tv appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/164400/258028&embedId=49341709&premium=false&height=445&width=425]

Council for Unity, 2008

I was not going to write about it, but now I just can’t help myself… the little devil on my shoulder has won!

When I was making the rounds at SatCon/HDCon 2008, I was making a concerted effort to keep an open mind, to be thoughtful and understanding when new sales rep’s felt the need to explain to me how streaming media works…

I felt profoundly antagonized by these young guns – is it because I am a female?

I have been building encoders from scrap heaps since the 90′s… and managing media servers for over 7 years now….

Anyway, I asked for an in-house demo of a Kontiki encoder, which hails to be the encoder for FLV – but when I spoke to the fellow on the conference floor, he kept insisting that their encoder was the leader in “HD Streaming”. Just to break it down for those casual blog readers, HD is a broadcast standard, once you take a video, stream it in packets and play it on a desktop player it is limited by the playback of your computer – which can not play back true HD. We call that pseudo HD.

I understand that they are the chosen one’s by Adobe, and apparently they are making so many sales they don’t need anyone to field test their product, but I really feel that we as consumers (B2B) we deserve the right to demo a product in our facility or yours!

On a final note, when I was at JPMC and had NO intention of ever buying a product, I would be given 6 month demos at the drop of a hat and then would get it renewed just as easily! However, in those circumstances, I was not permitted to disclose my opinions or experiences candidly.

Now that I am able to disclose information candidly, the most they are willing to give me is a week. Which isn’t really enough time to do a full risk analysis on a new piece of hardware.

FRUSTRATION :: MOUNTED!!

This is a great 3-in-1 show and I will be posting lots of great reviews and up-dates over the next few days! The issue is that they do not have an internet kiosk for the attendees so I am forced to submit this post today from a FedExKinokos rent-a-PC at 50 cents a minute!

Check back soon for the skinny on the HD, Video over IP and Sat reviews coming soon!

I always assumed that CATV was an acronym for “CAble Television” – alas, the Nico was mistaken (I know, go figure) CATV originally was “community antenna television” which later became “Community Access Television” and now it is often just associated with Cable TV.

Take a glimpse into broadcast history – this all sounds like streaming media to me:

Another benefit that came from the move to fiber-optic cable was greater customization. Since a single fiber-optic cable might serve 500 households, it became possible to target individual neighborhoods for messages and services. In the 1990s, cable providers found this same neighborhood grouping to be ideal for creating a local-area network and providing Internet access through cable modems.

In 1989, General Instruments demonstrated that it was possible to convert an analog cable signal to digital and transmit it in a standard 6-MHz television channel. Using MPEG compression, CATV systems installed today can transmit up to 10 channels of video in the 6-MHz bandwidth of a single analog channel. When combined with a 550-MHz overall bandwidth, this allows the possibility of nearly 1,000 channels of video on a system. In addition, digital technology allows for error correction to ensure the quality of the received signal.

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©Copyright 2004 Scientific-Atlanta, Inc. The Explorer 8000HD Home Entertainment Server features digital reception and DVR capabilities.

–> The move to digital technology also changed the quality of one of cable television’s most visible features: the scrambled channel.

If you would like more on the origin of “CATV” – go here: Franklin, Curt. “How Cable Television Works.” 13 September 2000. HowStuffWorks.com 14 October 2008.

Product & Service reviews from SATCON 2008

Included in this post are some of the exhibitors I intend to visit, time permitting. I am sure I will stumble on other exhbitors not on this list that may or may not impress me.

Leave a comment if you have any requests or recommendations.

Exhibitors list:

Hughes

www.hughes.com

Hughes Network Systems, LLC (Hughes) (NASDAQ:HUGH) is the global leader in providing broadband satellite products, networks, and services for enterprises, governments, small business, and consumers. Applications include managed network services, managed digital signage, multicast/broadcast content delivery, and interactive distance learning, as well as a complete range of portable and mobile SATCOM devices.

HDTV Media Group

www.hdtvmediagroup.com

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HDTV media group Network Teleports provide companies with full time, domestic and international Transmission markets, while retaining the key HDTV Network benefits that are so crucial in today’s Competitive Economic Environment services and performs more than One Hundred and twenty thousand uplinks for our clients around the world. Over 100 HD channels running 24/7, our teleports deliver High Definition MPEG2-4 compression allowing the highest quality signal transmission at any bit-rate for more than 250 clients. HDTV Media Group Network offers universal connectivity over Satellite & Fiber Europe, Asia, North America and Africa, Broadcasts Video Voice over IP & Data.

L-3 Communications

www.l-3com.com

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Headquartered in New York City, L-3 Communications is a leading merchant supplier of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) products, secure communications systems and products, avionics and ocean products, training products, microwave components and telemetry, instrumentation, space and wireless products. Its customers include the Department of Defense, selected US government intelligence agencies, aerospace prime contractors and commercial telecommunications and wireless customers.

Logic Innovations

www.logici.com

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Logic Innovations is a leading provider of equipment for digital broadcast and content distribution. Our products include DVB transmission equipment such as IP Encapsulators and Multiplexors, as well as receiver routers and content servers.

Rhozet

www.rhozet.com

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Rhozet’s products provide cost-effective and rapid transcoding across a wide range of applications from small studios to the largest enterprises. Carbon Coder is a stand-alone application that handles transcoding between all major formats. Carbon Server is a management tool that manages a network of Carbon Coder engines to accelerate transcoding for high-volume applications.

T-VIPS America Inc.

www.t-vips.com

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T-VIPS is a leading technology company specializing in Intelligent Transport Solutions. We’re offering smart products for broadcasters, telcos, network operators and MSOs who’s transmitting live television signals in contribution and primary distribution networks. T-VIPS products are purpose designed for low latency realtime broadcast quality transmissions, such as backhaul, contribution, studio-to-studio exchange and viewing, campus distribution, routing, post production and live event sports and news coverage.

Tremor Media

www.tremormedia.com

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Tremor Media is the leading online video advertising with in-banner and in-stream video advertising opportunities on over 1,000 publisher sites with more than 104 million unique visitors per month. Tremor also offers the Acudeo Video Monetization Platform, enabling publishers to monetize streaming video and maximize ROI on their video content.. For more information visit: http://www.tremormedia.com

..And others….

I’d like to introduce this blog in a way that makes sense to the world outside of my own mind – the evolution of this blog is somewhat convoluted today, as is the time in which we are now working – and especially so, as I am about to launch a new business on Wall Street in New York City, during a financial crisis

I am currently working on building out an HD fiber solution pointing to Azzurro, here in New York City, from a Wall Street conference center.

Verizon Business HD DVTS field engineers came to the space in Wall Street last Friday to do a site survey, they followed fiber through shaft-ways and floor boards and determined that the fiber was live but they couldn’t track down exactly where the splice led to.This is common in New York City, apparently the fiber in question was first dropped in 01/2008 and the engineer who did it is no longer “available” to fulfill the work-order. A random splice that leads to somewhere, just not exactly sure where somewhere is.

Although my active background focused on Enterprise technology, having served 7 years at JPMorganChase HQ in NYC, I spent a lot of time working in and around the Enterprise infrastructure building out their streaming media solutions – through 3 mergers, multiple integrations and “refresh” projects – and I tell you what… the corporate enterprise and the infrastructures we find in the large cities translate quite literally by a matter of scale, only varying by the number of “boxes” and dependencies crammed into what some may just sum up as the “cloud” – I reject the whole concept of the cloud – they do translate quite literally, with all the same vulnerabilities, bubble-gum hybrid cross-connects and good intentions.

INFRASTRUCTURE: Don’t let your eyes glaze over

I notice my friends just smile and nod when I try to engage them in conversations about the importance of a stable, scalable and dynamic infrastructure – for streaming media professionals and now all of the Broadcast Media, the infrastructure is what makes it all happen 24/7 in HD. It won’t be such a distant issue when you turn on your television in order to watch the big PPV game, and your cable operator has lost the two-way broadcast connectivity with your set top box (Frequency out of range) – then it will be YOUR issue. In the mean time, let’s think about how to proactively acknowledge what may seem like minor issues today, minor issues that could potentially amplify in scale as broadcasters and consumers move onto new networks, that could intensify and eventually become huge risk factors.

UPDATE:  10/17/2008 ****  This article just posted on CRAINS

FCC fines Time Warner for blocking channels

Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cox Communications Inc. each received fines for using a technology that prevents some customers from accessing certain channels.

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For example, the situation with Verizon I mentioned previously, that scenario got my wheels turning and I thought, what a great metaphor for the broadcast industry and how we are bursting ahead! We know we are moving ahead very quickly, it is fiber afterall, we are just not quite sure where we are going to end up!

GORILLA ENGINEERING: Only on weekends…

The situation with Verizon is not the first time I found myself watching an engineer peer up a shaftway or crawl under a floor panel only to hear him say, “Not sure where it’s going, but it’s going somewhere” – when it was Time Warner Cable at my Chelsea townhouse, the engineer asked if he could disconnect everything while I run up-stairs and call him on his cell, so he could reconnect each cable, line-by-line, in order to track down which cable is going where by process of elimination – well that worked in a 4 story building with a total of 5 STB‘s and 1 RoadRunner connection; however, you can’t just unplug every connection in a 40 story office building in Wall Street and triage one connection at a time, or can you?

They have some brilliant minds at work that will figure it all out, map it and fix it… but the infrastructure in New York City is a mess. Go up to any NYC rooftop and take a good, long look around those cables flung over the roof tops and and phone lines hanging on the fire escapes, that is our communications infrastructure… an angry squirrel could take down your command center if you are not careful!

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

I was working on a project to bring some broadcast and streaming services to and from Istanbul, Turkey – a quick forensics on the infrastructure in Turkey made me think, “this is just another Enterprise unto itself” – and the cables over the rooftops and across the lamp posts can be mapped, triaged, optimized… When I was told that there is no geo-restriction in Turkey, we quickly found that wasn’t truly the case – it is probably just not an openly discussed public policy on the government platform;however, on the ISP level, you can’t get in and out without the blessings of the policy controllers on their networks.

We have these issue here in the good ole’ USA, in case you haven’t heard or suspected – Comcast admitted to throttling bandwidth for sites that they deemed bandwidth hogs. If Turkey doesn’t want to be “seen” by US metrics gathering systems, etc. it won’t be, per se… There are so many battles being waged in this arena, I won’t go back to it unless something outrageous happens that impacts Broadcast, specifically. I promise i will try to anyway

THE FINAL SPLICE

The random networking models that are merging and emerging are getting “spliced” together at times in a haphazard fashion, amalgams are then formed and the results are what are driving the new broadcast business model.

The line between streaming and non-streaming broadcast media technologies has blurred… in such a way, where you really need to squint your eyes at the future, lean forward and try to follow that splice to see where it is going.