ATLANTA – Over 15,500 delegates visited Atlanta for the 2006 NCTA National Show, to take in sessions and visit 360 exhibiting companies.
Here’s more of what we heard and saw on the floor of the Georgia World Congress Centre.
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Sprint/Nextel will be field testing a quad play wireless service with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks in 2007. More MSO partners are expected to come on board the cellular/WiFi/cable data solution, said Sprint president John Garcia, during a session.
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With Time Warner Cable abandoning the S-A "Sara" guide in favor of its own, other users of Scientific-Atlanta set tops have been a little worried the company might cease support of that guide and the old Power TV platform altogether. Rest assured, S-A CTO Bob McIntyre told cartt.ca, that the company will continue to support both guides going forward.
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Rogers Cable will begin offering Howard Stern TV on demand in May. In Demand Networks said at the show it will distribute the VOD package to Rogers as well as Charter Communications and hotel services LodgeNet Entertainment Corp. and On Command Video Corp. The additions mean Stern will be available in a million hotel rooms and to 21 million North Americans.
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Got an iPod? A PlayStation Portable? A Treo? Any handheld that plays video? Then Seachange can link any MSO’s on demand content to it. Not that it’s really legal or that any rights deals are even close, but it was neat to see such an application live. The company’s Axiom Software enables the plug-and-play video links from set top boxes many (inactive) ports – and can also enable network DVR and personal advertising.
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Game console ownership (XBox, PlayStation, GameCube) has gone from 44% ownership among American households to 52%, according to data from U.S. research firm Parks Associates. Many households have multiple game sets. Revenue from game sales is in the US$7 billion range. With ever more gamers playing amongst themselves on line, can cable companies profit from this huge segment of the entertainment industry – besides the monthly fee for high speed Internet access? Maybe. During a session featuring Rogers Communications chief strategy officer Mike Lee that provided more questions than answers, MSOs would clearly like to be in the gaming space, but whether or not customers would want to play Grand Theft Auto on their HD PVR is a mystery. A more likely revenue stream would be to offer guaranteed high speed QoS to on-line gamers, for a fee.
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With the announcement that Disney/ABC is making available, for free on the web, a number of episodes of its highest-rated programming, Time Warner Cable’s programming czar Fred Dressler, during a Tuesday session asked why then should cable companies pay ABC for retransmission consent. If parent company Disney is going to give it away, why should cable have to pay a fee, he wanted to know?
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Aptiv Digital, the former Pioneer Digital IPG creator, had a few neat demonstrations. In its booth it was showcasing Passport Echo for the OCAP platform, operating on multiple OCAP software stacks and on a range of OCAP ready digital set-tops. New applications for the Motorola DCT platform include Interactive Video Mosaic, iSubscribe, Showrunner VOD, Remote Wizard, Passport Weather, and PassTime" Puzzles. Aptiv also demonstrated its Multi-Room DVR operating on both of the predominant headend network systems (S-A and Moto) and set-top types.
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BigBand Networks showed how its switched digital solutions can be used for individually targeted advertising. "Over the last several years, local insertion into digital programming has become increasingly geographically precise through zoning," said its release. "With targeting, different subscribers within the same zone watching the same program could receive different advertisements based on their demographics or other relevant factors. This would be achieved by individually directed streams with switched broadcast, or techniques in which subscribers’ set-top boxes dynamically tune to different digital streams or frequency channels at moments of ad insertion. Switched broadcast may also play an important role in the latter case by freeing sufficient capacity to accommodate the inserted advertisements."
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Consumer adoption of new technologies will boost media revenues in 2006, predicted Kagan Research, at the show. Its MEDIA TRENDS report says that the on line ad market will grow by over 21% in 2006 to finish the year with US$14.5 billion in revenue. Over the next 10 years, Kagan says the on line ad market will grow by 8.7% a year, reaching US$25.5 billion in five years and US$33.4 billion by 2016. Maybe this is why ABC is putting its shows on the web.
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Next year’s National Cable Telecommunications National Show will be May 7-9, 2007 in Las Vegas.
