DURING A SESSION called “Online, On Demand and On TV, Rogers Cable VP and GM Television, David Purdy, noted that when households showing a high rate of P2P sharing were turned into DVR homes, their P2P traffic dropped by 15%, meaning they were looking for fewer TV and movies on line on demand and instead relying on their cable operator and traditional channels more.
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Baseball legend Lou Brock, signing autographs in the Fox booth, looks so good at 69 years old, I think he could still swipe some bases today. Baseball opening day is this weekend.
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Cogeco Cable’s director of international markets, Gary Pelletier, is leaving the company after six years (but not the industry) to join nascent music distributor Stingray Digital – which just recently purchased MaxTrax from Corus and is the agent in Canada for the Galaxie music service.
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When you’re just a humble customer, you don’t realize how incredibly difficult and complex it is to deliver video to all platforms and devices. Millions of hours of content to millions of customers on dozens of devices, wherever they are, all requesting at the same time is the vision of the future, said those from Cisco, Tandberg and Comcast in a technical session today. But how to do it so quality doesn’t suffer? That’s the puzzler they’re working on.
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Comcast’s VP quality assurance Dave Higgins says that 40% of customer churn is due to video quality problems – and the tripping points to providing a great HD experience, for example, are many, from the camera, to broadcaster ingest to delivery and MSO rate shaping and grooming to even the ambient light levels in the customers’ home. I don’t envy this guy his job, searching for macro-blocking and smear and noise and haloing and contouring… He says Comcast is working on a complete end-to-end overhaul of its HD video chain – and is even building fibre links to its major content providers to eliminate at least one potential fault line.
– Greg O’Brien
