Harris Corporation (NYSE:HRS) and LG Electronics are moving closer to the adoption of their MPH™ (Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld) standard for mobile devices. With a decision by the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) due in late 2008
 

Jay Adrick, Vice President of Broadcast Technology for Harris Broadcast addressed some questions about the proposed MPH standard as relates to TV broadcasters.
 
IpTVe
Currently, how many broadcast stations are in trials of the MPH platform?
 
Jay Adrick
MPH is currently on the air on two stations in Chicago, WCPX (owned by ION) and WPWR (owned by Fox), plus the Capitol Broadcasting Station WRAL in Raleigh, North Carolina. Since February 2007, U.S. MPH trials have also been conducted in Columbus, OH; Washington, D.C.; Las Vegas, NV; and San Jose, CA.
 

Full Story: Jay Adrick, VP of Broadcast Technology for Harris Broadcast talks about MPH™ (Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld)

 
WRAL-TV Raleigh, North Carolina (a Capital Broadcasting Company) likes to be first when it comes to new broadcast technology testing and deployment.

The first U.S station awarded an experimental HD license by the FCC, (June 1996)

Claimed to have produced the first live sports program in HD (on September 6, 1997)

First HD newscast (on October 28, 1998) stats via Wikipedia

July, 2008 WRAL has just concluded trials of MPH or Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld mobile video technology, developed by Harris Corporation in concert with LG Electronics.

Jimmy Goodmon, CBC New Media Group Director of Technology gave us more granularity about their dierction for MPH.
   

IpTVe
How long do you anticipate the trials to last and do you have a soft launch date for going live?
 
Jimmy Goodmon
We completed the trials last week and were impressed with the results. In terms of a soft launch date the answer is nothing is set in stone right now. There are way too many variables in place for us to make an estimate on a launch date (be it soft or not). One of those variables playing a role in terms of when we go live with mobile TV is the availability of receivers. Since mobile TV enabled devices are projected to be in stores sometime in 2009 we will have to wait until that time to better gauge the market.
 

Full Story: WRAL-TV, leading broadcasters towards MPH™ (Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld)

  
Update for Tuesday August 5th

The winner of the ROKU/Netflix settop box is Patrick Seaman, Association Television, LLC. Many thanks to all the people who entered the contest..

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In the beginning of July, Roku sent us their Netflix settop box in which we did a comprehensive evaluation. Originally thinking I might keep for myself, I have decided instead to give it away to one of our readers.

To Enter, leave a comment on this post (along with your industry title and valid company email address - required to be entered). I will pick a person on August 5th using a random number selector (based on the total number of entries and the order of your entry). We will cover the shipping cost (Sorry open only to U.S. residents as Netflix streaming content is not licesensed outside the U.S.) The Roku unit comes with the original box, manual, video/audio cable, ac power supply and remote. Important: You will need to have a Netflix account at the $8.99/month level in order to use the Roku Settop box, Good luck!

(note: this giveaway is not associated with Dan Rayburn's site)

An entirely new medium
by Levi Shapiro

Patrick Maurer is no techie. "I can barely work my toaster", says the lanky 29 year old sales rep with the self-described "tennis player" hairstyle. But Patrick may represent the most promising aspect of mobile marketing- mobile video advertising. While checking his mobile Yahoo account, Patrick watched a video from Jaguar that eventually led to a dealer test-drive. "I hadn't really looked at the Jag before that", he said. The opportunity for brands to tell their story with sight, sound and motion has agencies and advertisers eager to experiment with mobile video advertising. This nascent sector probably has the necessary technology to grow. What is lacking now are clearly defined business processes.

Continue reading: Mobile Video Advertising

I spoke with Dakota Sullivan, the Vice President of Marketing at Adap.TV. Adap.TV is a new breed of video advertising platform designed to leverage different ad networks for Publishers as well as Ad networks to reach their target audience. The system was programmed and designed to be intelligent, i.e. learn user habits over time and delivery more customized and targeted ads. One of the most well know placements is an in-stream banner overlay (max 468x66) which appears with a corresponding contextual link to an advertiser.

Audio Interview with Dakota Sullivan

Company Site: Adap.tv

Example of banner overlay:

I spoke with David Frigeri, General Manager & VP for Content Delivery at Internap about their CDN and managed hosting business. In addition to our conversation, I've listed some thoughts and issues in the marketplace also worth noting.
 

Adaptive Video Delivery seems to be an important trend for video distribution with next generation broadband video solutions and how it stacks up against true peer to peer delivery

Ad insertion models for media distribution are becoming vital, although there does not seem to be a lot of effort to target ads based on customer demographics

Recent activity in the CDN marketplace and who owns what intellectual property

Forward and store video is something CDN's do not seem to be talking about

Audio Interview with David Frigeri

Mirco Pasqualini, Developer of CrossCast Systems was recently in the States and stopped by our New York office to demo their content management and delivery system. Geared for media companies, CrossCast is as robust as any system I have seen, this including BrightCove.

Having said that, without significant funding and adoption by large media outlets in the U.S or Europe, I think the company, located in Northern Italy is going to have their work cut out for them.

Watch the demo and check out Exclusive screen shots of their soon to be released version upgrade on the following page. Demo of CrossCast Systems Platform

Continue reading "Mirco Pasqualini, Developer CrossCast Systems" »

In a just released study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Author John B. Horrigan, Associate Director, Research found a flattening of broadband adoption among the poor, those with annual incomes of less then $20,000 in addition to African Americans who saw a rise of only 3% over the past year.

Interestingly, households with lower-middle incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 saw an increase in the adoption rate of 24%.

Some other findings of note:

Home broadband adoption grew by 17% from May 2007 to May 2008, slightly faster than the
growth rate of the year before.

Only 10% of Americans adults use dial up Internet connections at home to go online.

Broadband growth was strong among older and lower-middle income Americans, as well as rural Americans. However, One-quarter (27%) of adult Americans are not Internet users, and they tend to be older (the median age is 61) and have lower-incomes.

Monthly broadband bills are 4% lower in May 2008 than at the end of 2005, but monthly dial-up bills have risen.

Non-Internet users represent a large pool of potential broadband users, but many are just not
interested in getting online.

One-third (34%) of all Internet users have connected to the Internet using a WiFi connection at someplace other than home or work.

"The flat growth in home high-speed adoption for low-income Americans suggests that tightening household budgets may be affecting people's choice of connection speed at home," said John B. Horrigan, Associate Director of Research at the Pew Internet & American Life project and author of the report. "Broadband is more costly on a monthly basis than dial-up, and some lower income Americans may be unwilling to take on another expense."

Continue reading "Pew Internet Study: Broadband Adoption Trends" »

With the announcement today in Variety that Strike TV will soft launch over the weekend with a sizzle reel with 40 original made for net webisodes and other "content bits" coming later in July, some WGA members have decided to strike out on their own.

In the traditional Loss Leader approach, a product is sold at a price at or below cost to generate other more profitable sales, for example giving away razors so that people become hooked on purchasing replacement blades, where all the money is.

While ITV programs are not razor blades the goal appears much the same, generate revenue by pulling people in for a larger pay day. As the article mentioned, among the sites goals are to showcase the work of WGA members."the hope is that the site will become a buzz-generator for ideas and concepts that creators can adapt into movies, TV shows or other media."

Some of the programming Strike TV has in its cue includes:

"Global Warming," starring "Saturday Night Live's" Kirsten Wiig and "Daily Show's" Aasif Mandvi;

"Unknown Sender," penned by Steven de Souza and starring Timothy Dalton and Joanne Whalley;

"House Poor," created by "Office" writer-producer Lester Lewis;

"The Challenge," starring Bob Newhart and penned by sitcom vet Lloyd Garver;

"Five or Die," written and directed by horror movie vet Tom Holland;

"John's Hand," starring Garret Dillahunt and Kali Rocha.

WGA members hope to generate movies or TV shows because of eyeballs and advertising which has been the goal of Indie producers since ITV became a practical avenue for content distribution. It is fair to say that WGA members are putting some stock in their status in the industry along with connections to make the difference.

Continue reading "Strike TV, a Loss Leader Strategy?" »

   
Recently I spoke to John Edwards, President and CEO of Move Networks. We spoke about a variety of topics including the companies business focus, why he considers their delivery network superior to tradition open networks, why the company is not a tradition CDN or P2P company, but a vertical in the end too end content delivery space, plus other topics.

Some of the areas that might be of concern for the future in their space, include:

Since they use adaptive rate technology - Microsoft may want to bake it into their own platform at some point, which could offset the deal with Silverlight.

As I understand, analytics is a big draw for media brands who want easy to use, shrink-wrapped platforms, these technologies may not be IP protected and could be replicated by other players. Of course first mover advantage usually is a plus so these may offset.

Audio Interview with John Edwards

I recently tested the Netflix Player by ROKU. Since I've used a PC for this purpose for the past year, I was interested to see if the ROKU player had improved ease of use and functionality, this against my current pc configuration.

I spoke with Diane Galligan, Executive Producer Yahoo! tech ticker about their video platform for delivering financial news along with user comments. Tech ticker has its roots in efforts like their FinanceVision platform from 2000 however, they point out their scrolling text field is an innovative design which keeps the video in front of the viewer.

Referring to FinanceVision, Stephanie Arnoldy of tech ticker said "Even now, with broadband far more common, we don't feel users need or want this kind of full live coverage online. We have taken a far more targeted approach, offering discreet single-topic clips that are timely but not live, paired with real-time blogging."

In addition, user comments are seen by Diane as a plus since they are starting a conversation with the audience which increases site stickiness. They do not use pre or post rolls for ad placement.

Perhaps financial news viewers and those that watch tech ticker compared say to sports do not want as much interactivity however, UI's such as MLB's Mosaic is an example of multi-pane layout with extensive user interaction and customization.

Interview with Diane
   

Also See Past Articles FinanceVision:
Do You Remember FinanceVIsion
Return of the Y! Vision Platform?

Looking at the illustrations on the Roku site, you'd be hard pressed not to be up and running in ten minutes or less, certainly much less time then it took me to configure and older pc that's connect to our home set. In addition, they got the connections right with HDMI, component video and optical audio, this in addition to S-video. The one upgrade I would like to see is usability with universal remotes to reduce remote clutter.

Sony and the six largest cable operators announced an agreement Tuesday to move in the direction of eliminating the set-top box from the consumers already cluttered landscape.

The agreement is between Sony and Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems Corp. and Bright House Networks which comprises over 80 percent of U.S. cable subs. The Java-based platform will utilize the tru2way specification. According to CableLabs, existing applications include interactive guides, "start over" applications, and games; future applications might include, for example, interactive ads, chat, web browsing, and t-commerce

Specific to IPTV and interactive applications that reside on the multitude of set-top boxes from companies like Ensequence, which basically alluded to an integration of components within the TV form factor.

According to Aslam Khader, chief product officer at Ensequence, "the merging of technology will basically move the set-top box componentry into the TV and the applications that Ensequence customers produce will run on the TV set, which may lead to more consistent interactive television implementations."

One might think this a boon for such companies as they will no longer have write compliant applications across hundreds of different boxes. How this may improve the work flow from a consistency, human resource perspective, cycle time or cost perspective may not yet be known. NueLion which uses a proprietary set-top box for distributing IPTV content did not reply to our request prior to going to press.

Interview with Rob Angelino about Beauty TV. Beauty TV is a 24/7 beauty network and is in pre-production on a daily hybrid syndicated show for traditional broadcast television.. Content is focused on beauty tips, hair, skin, nails, cosmetic surgery, spas, health, fitness, insider interviews, beauty news, product reviews and trends. Current advisory board members include John Paul DeJoria, founder of Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron Tequila and former executives from EXTRA TV, 'E!" Entertainment, Sony Television and AOL.

Audio Interview with Rob E. Angelino, Founder & CEO Beauty TV