CHICAGO – The popular National Cable Telecommunications Association’s Cable Show this year evolved into the Internet and Television Expo INTX in order to extend its vision. It was time to look beyond traditional and look at the trends and what is competing with real television and real life.
Here are a few highlights from Tuesday’s opening general session.
-
Google, YouTube and Snapchat are intensely followed today, providing a lot of creativity and diverse content, but there is still huge consumer demand for proprietary programming and networks. Which is why all these new media companies are investing heavily in their own content.
-
The Cloud has changed everything. Search is what conference opener Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast, wanted to talk about as he announced Comcast is rolling out technology for a voice control remote. Comcast believes it is the key to content quantity and discoverability. The company’s customers are tallying about 2.4 billion searches a day using their X1 interactive entertainment OS already and voice will add another dimension to it. The remote will be available at no extra charge to their customers and the plan is to have between five to six million devices out this year alone. It listens like Apple’s Siri and will have more than 3 million commands to begin with. It pulls info to answer your question and allows you to dig further into the answer with further detail to enhance the customer experience.
-
The new Xfinity Home Gateway will provide numerous home services from locking your door, turning your lights on or off, thermostat control – all through one app for all devices. Roberts previewed Comcast’s powerful, multi-purpose home gateway that will make gigabit Internet speeds available to “an overwhelming majority” of its customers. Developed by its teams in Philadelphia and Silicon Valley, Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.1 modem goes into production this year and will be available to customers in early 2016. When combined with a DOCSIS 3.1-enabled network, the gateway is capable of delivering speeds greater than 1 Gbps. It will be the company’s first product to integrate software that Comcast acquired in its 2014 purchase of PowerCloud. It also uses open-sourced RDK B software, built by Comcast with contributions from many in the RDK community.
-
Roberts (pictured, courtesy NCTA) does not see a collapse of the cable bundle, but that with the IP delivery to the younger demographics, it will force the bundles to reinvent themselves. He noted that with programming, piracy has always been there to a certain degree but last week’s Mayweather-Pacquiao fight was “off the charts” with pirating. (Twitter’s Periscope app, where users can turn their smartphones into broadcast cameras for their Twitter followers, is especially scary for live events.)
-
Known brands will drive their following and will continue to thrive and dominate. Lesser known brands will have a struggle. The content pie will continue to grow.
-
Tim Armstrong AOL’s CEO was interviewed about his sometimes-forgotten, pioneering internet company. Recently, in order to provide more transparency, he Periscoped his quarterly meeting, adding 2,500 additional viewers to his meeting. Why this last minute act?He wanted to get his company to shift into a more instant video mindset. AOL is making numerous investments, especially using its Huffington Post as a content leader. Armstrong feels the content pie will get bigger, valued content will skyrocket and advertising will get really expensive.
