Archive for May, 2007

The three General Sessions from The Cable Show will be played on C-SPAN, reports Broadcasting & Cable. C-SPAN, the cable-industry backed public affairs network, says it will air three major sessions from the National Cable & Telecommunications Associaton over the next three Saturday mornings, as well as in prime time on the Memorial Day Weekend — May 25-28 — on C-SPAN2.

As has been mentioned several times already, one of the highlights of The Cable Show this year was the demo of DOCSIS 3.0 technology by Comcast Chairman & CEO Brian Roberts, with the assistance of ARRIS Chairman Bob Stanzione.

There has been a great deal of discussion this year about distributing content on a variety of platforms, such as a panel on the new consumer experience or a panel on the commercial potential of new platforms.

The wideband demo that Brian Roberts showed on Tuesday, made ripples today in the media. What Roberts showed was a next generation cable modem using the channel bonding features of DOCSIS 3.0 to combine up to four 6 MHz data channels, thus achieving download speeds of up to 160 million bits per second.

The cable industry’s charge for the next 12 months: Make just about every cable network available on demand, and develop an advanced-advertising management system for cable that rivals what’s now on the Internet.

CableNET celebrated its 15th anniversary this year in Las Vegas. As it has in year’s past, this educational technology showcase highlighted a wide variety of next-generation broadband technologies and services that cable operators are expected to deliver to consumers in the near term.

This afternoon, we released the following projected attendance and exhibitor numbers for The Cable Show ’07. 15,000 attendees 196,000 square feet of exhibit space 389 exhibitors All of these projected figures are on par with last year’s numbers.

“Advertising” and “on demand” seem to be tied at the semantic hip here, as momentum builds for new systems and approaches designed to weave advertising support into cable’s growing video-on-demand business.

Yesterday afternoon, Cable in the Classroom presented a session at The Cable Show featuring a panel of high school students drawn from Clark County-Las Vegas schools and teen media marketing expert, Anastasia Goodstein of Ypulse.

Tuesday, May 8th: 11:45 – 12:30 p.m. John Atanasio, CEO of Art World Television, LLC, announced the premier of the Art Gallery TV channelset for launch later this month on Comcast VOD.

Once again, gaming is being addressed at The Cable Show.  If you drop by the Cable Game Arena, for example, you can see “Into the Pixel,” a juried exhibit of video game art, such as in the photo to the left.

The changing television environment was addressed yesterday in a first-ever gathering of industry Chief Digital Officers.  “A Wider Canvas: TV Creators on the Potential (and Peril) of New Platforms” was moderated by the L.A.

Here’s the cornerstone question raised at a Monday panel session on home-media technology: Is Wall Street Journal digital-technology guru Kara Swisher the embodiment of the future, or what a statistician would call an aberration?

Today was Day Two of the 8th annual Supplier Diversity workshop (see previous coverage). Giving the keynote address today was Alfred E. Osborne, Jr., Ph.D., Senior Associate Dean & Associate Professor of Global Economics & Management, Founder & Faculty Director, Harold Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Anderson School of Management, UCLA.

At this morning’s opening General Session, Brian Roberts, Chairman & CEO of Comcast, showed off a powerful new capability for cable’s high-speed offering. First, the audience was treated to a video of Roberts at the 1996 National Show, showing off the superiority of a cable modem over dial-up or ISDN by simply downloading two pictures.