Versatile Amphibian

Despite Apple’s continued (official) non-participation and the announcement that this would be Microsoft’s last year , CES 2012 proved to be a bumper year for gadget spotters. 20,000 new devices were launched in the course of a week and although I expect that more than a few will fail to achieve the lofty aims of their promoters, they serve to demonstrate the electronics business’ believe that even a weak economy can’t dim consumer appetite for devices. With so many devices finding their way into the eager hands of consumers this year, I thought it was worth going back to a subject I first talked about after last year’s NAB – that of content clearinghouses. This is a concept that I often get asked about as the buzz surrounding Verizon’s VDMS launch is still reverberating around the carrier industry. The following is a brief introduction to the concept, technology, business model and market for content clearinghouses and in-network media engines. The challenge of mass distribution of ...

Verizon announced yesterday that it will launch an end to end digital video service that enables content creators and digital retailers to outsource the entire digital supply chain to them. This is the first such move by Telcos to get a cut of the maturing market in digital content delivery and differentiate themselves from the pure CDN players. By providing a large scale "utility" service for this increasingly non-differentiating part of the value chain, Verizon should be able to dramatically reduce the cost of streaming video and potentially further accelerate the demise of traditional TV (if one believes that the latter's demise is inevitable). I can't say much more as I've been involved in the launch of this service, other than I'm looking forward to seeing whether the market is ready for end-to-end delivery to be fully commoditised. Time will tell.