SCTE Canadian Summit: Comcast CTO Werner (a former Rogers engineer) sees cloudy future for media

By Alan Breznick

TORONTO - Peeking through the network clouds, Comcast CTO and executive vice-president Tony Werner has seen the future and it is digital rights management.In a keynote address at the SCTE Canadian Summit Tuesday morning, Werner predicted that “physical media will disappear” by 2020 as “digital assets move to the cloud.” As a result, he said, consumers will largely acquire the rights to use digital media content in certain ways, instead of buying huge computer hard drives, Blu-ray players, and other devices, or building collections of DVDs, CDs, tapes, books, newspapers, and other physical assets.“Life is not about having big hard...