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IBC - A recap

September 25, 2008

In stark contrast to the Wall Street, IBC with its record attendance levels and success, offered quite a few positive and interesting trends to the video services space. Three areas that have received considerable attention are content security, interactive television solutions, and advertising. Widevine showcased ‘Widevine Cypher’ which offers operators the ability to leverage a single content protection to manage content protection across multiple platforms without additional deployments at the head end. This directly targets the major cost and operational concerns operators have in deploying multiple verticals of CAS and DRM in order to cater to the broadcast/multicast needs of different platforms and managing them separately. Envivio and Adobe have come out with innovative encoding solutions that facilitate efficient content delivery across three platforms by reducing the need to decode and re-encode video for different platforms. NDS Dynamic and Microsoft Mediaroom Ad platforms are among the many ad related releases that address the need for dynamic and targeted ad insertion solutions coupled with the enhanced viewing analysis platforms. There haven’t been a any clear trends or announcements from the operators’ side in this area. It will interesting to watch how the operators will actually deploy and build business models to fully monetize their new ad infrastructures. In regards to converged services, Ericsson, a strong proponent of IMS based services, announced the launch of their IPTV middleware that packs IMS integration. This brings up a key question; while IMS promises an open and seamless interoperability framework for service portability across multiple delivery platforms, the interest level ,the investment level rather, among the operators still is unclear. Operators already offer services such as caller ID on TV, cross platform messaging, and social networking over television. How IMS will enhance these services and the ROI for the operators investing in IMS prior to full evolution towards 4G/LTE remains to be answered.