Introductory Remarks from Innovation '08

Here's my opening remarks from Media Access Project's Innovation '08 in Santa Clara this morning. A DVD will be available shortly. This was a lively discussion, with Google and Vuze on the case. Good morning and welcome. My name is Richard Bennett and I'm a network engineer. I've built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi... I'm opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we're going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain. more»

Network Neutrality

In January of this year, a frontpage article on WSJ quoted Verizon Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg "We have to make sure they (Google) don't sit on our network and chew up our capacity". Both AT&T and Bellsouth also made similar statements in the same article. A few days ago, Verizon repeat their call to "End Google's Free Lunch": "A Verizon Communications Inc. executive yesterday accused Google Inc. of freeloading for gaining access to people's homes using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build." ...it is no surprise that Network Neutrality, a concept where broadband providers are not to discriminate rivals when they charge tolls or prioritize traffic, is now on the agenda of the US Congress. more»

Google Predicting Next Ten Years of the Internet

While celebrating its 10th year anniversary this month, Google reflects on the "enormous impact" that the Internet has had on people's lives around the world. "It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of," says Google in its recent blog postings related to "Google at 10". In today's blog post, Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube (acquired by Google) says: "Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially. Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call..." more»

Internet Out of IPv4 Addresses by 2012, the Consultancy Says

The growing popularity of smartphones, IPTV and other gadgets connecting to the Internet is eating up real estate on the net, and soon techies can expect cyberspace to run out of room, according to a Frost & Sullivan analyst briefing Thursday.

Experts say today's Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) also limits services of multimedia content and data communication, including mobile IP, P2P and video calls. With new mobile IPv6, telecommunication providers can easily roll out custom services from movies to ring tones to television. more»

US Online Video to Reach 88% of Internet Users, Says New Report

The online video audience is expected to reach 190 million people by 2012, 88% of the Internet user population, according to the recent report by market research firm, eMarketer. The future of the video industry depends largely on how stakeholders navigate technical challenges, infrastructure upgrades, the migration to mobile, and ongoing consumer resistance to ads and payments. "After some false starts with ill-fated transactional experiments, online video content owners and distributors are pursuing a strategy that closely follows the standard TV business model," says Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst. more»

Research Firm Predicts 22.4 million IPTV Subscribers by 2013 in Asia-Pacific

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan research firm suggests that the IPTV subscriber base in Asia-Pacific -- covering 13 countries -- reached 4.1 million in 2007 and estimates this number to reach 22.4 million by the end of 2013, at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 32.7 percent (2007-2013). Of the 13 countries, eight had commercial IPTV services in 2007, while the rest are conducting trials for expected deployments from 2009 onwards, according to the report. "Many service providers feel the urge to launch IPTV services as a defensive strategy to increase their 'n-play' offerings with one more service." more»

IPTV Subscriptions to Grow 64% Worldwide in 2008

Worldwide subscriptions to internet Protocol television (IPTV) services are on pace to reach 19.6 million subscribers in 2008, a 64.1 per cent increase from 12 million subscribers in 2007, according to research company, Gartner, Inc. Worldwide IPTV revenue is projected to total $4.5 billion in 2008, a 93.5 per cent increase from 2007 revenue of $2.3 billion. In 2008, 1.1 per cent of households worldwide will be subscribers of IPTV. By the end of 2012, Gartner forecasts worldwide household penetration of IPTV will be 2.8 per cent, while worldwide IPTV revenue is expected to total $19 billion in 2012. more»

U.S. Online TV Viewership Doubled in the Last Two Years

Online TV viewing has been gaining in popularity according to a recent survey of 10,000 households. Nearly one-fifth of American households who use the Internet watch television broadcasts online, double the viewership from 2006, The Conference Board and TNS reports. The top two destinations for online broadcasts are the official TV channel homepage and YouTube. "The shift from appointment TV to content on demand is well underway," says Michael Saxon, Senior VP at TNS. "Fundamentally, consumers expect content to be available when they want it, and on the screen of their choice -- TV, PC, or mobile. For consumers, PCs enhance content on demand from simply time-shifting to place-shifting. Online content can be viewed in any room in the house, or at work or school." more»

700 MHz Auction Winners: Why Block C Matters

Today the FCC announced the winners of the 700 MHz auction -- and you can see from pp. 62-63 of this document that Verizon won Block C. (Block C was set up in two nationwide paired blocks of 11 MHz each, which were auctioned off in very large geographic areas -- 12 licenses, each covering a "Regional Economic Area Grouping". Verizon won seven of the twelve licenses, covering all of the US except Alaska, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands.) Why does this matter? more»

It’s March Madness Time and I Want My IPTV!

IPTV is on the horizon. Maybe I watch too much basketball, but the first thing I pictured was turning my flat screen into a big PC-like monitor with multiple windows showing several games, and perhaps even checking email and trying to do a bit work in another (admittedly much smaller) window. You could drag and drop, expand or shrink the games to whatever size you wanted just like you do on a PC with applications. Since the source video could come from different geographical regions in the country, you could catch the NCAA game they are showing in your local region while also watching another game from another region... For some, IPTV is a reality. But for the most part deployments are limited. more»

Internet Traffic to Reach a Zettabyte by 2015, Says Study

A recent report released by the Discovery Institute estimates that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1021 bytes), or one million million billion bytes. From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to "cloud computing" and ubiquitous mobile cameras, 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence, the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. more»

"The Broadband Revolution"

The International Telecommunications Union recently issued a press release announcing with joy the release of "the first set of global standards for Internet Protocol TV (IPTV)." A key sentence: "A combination of voice, Internet and video services over a single broadband link and from a single provider is foreseen as the ultimate goal of the broadband revolution." Those of you who lived through 'What Is Broadband Good For?' with me last summer, know that the word "broadband" is a pet bugaboo of mine. It's a word that answers a lot of policy questions in a particular way. more»

Clues about the Future of TV

A recent article chronicles the telcos' slow start in cable TV. I don't think the telcos stand a chance of succeeding in cable TV. Instead, if they're to succeed at all, they'll probably buy or form alliances with existing cablecos... But they'd better start swimming, because the times are a changing.. more»

IPTV on Steady Rise with More Views and Channels

The number of viewers watching TV piped into homes over the internet is increasing as more broadcasters look to offer their content this way.

Research out today reveals the number of people downloading television content or watching it live online is growing rapidly in the UK. According to findings from Continental Research, 5.4 per cent of the UK population have watched IPTV. In total, 3.6 per cent have watched streamed live content and 3.3 per cent have watched a program that they have downloaded. more»

Give Us TVoIP, Not IPTV

A buzzword in the cable/ilec world is IPTV, a plan to deliver TV over IP. Microsoft and several other companies have built IPTV offerings, to give phone and cable companies what they like to call a "triple play" (voice, video and data) and be the one-stop communications company. ...I'm at the pulver.com Von conference where people are pushing this, notably the BellSouth exec who just spoke. But they've got it wrong. We don't need IPTV. We want TVoIP or perhaps more accurately Vid-o-IP. more»