Archive for May, 2009

Earlier this week, I examined the recent coverage of the “cord-cutting” phenomenon. What I wanted to do was look at two questions: Can you really replace your cable service with just online video?

Leslie Ellis in her Multichannel News article, Translation Please: Best of NCTA Tech Papers, 2009*, reviewed three of the nineteen papers available in the 2009 NCTA Technical Papers.  The papers she reviewed are: The Challenges of Stopping Illegal Peer-to-Peer File Sharing by Kevin Bauer, Dirk Grunwald and Douglas Sickler from University of Colorado This paper was presented in the Technical Papers session, “Highly Individual: Content Protection and Delivery in the Digital Era.” Increasing MSO Advertising Revenues Through Management of Ad Skipping by Dan Holden of Comcast Media Center This paper was presented in the Technical Papers session, “Sending the Right Message: Techniques and Technologies for Targeted Advertising.” Wireless and Home Networking: A Foundation for Service Provider Applications by Timothy Burke of Liberty Global, Inc.

Online viewing of video is on the rise. This is a fact. But if you take the news coverage and blog posts about the “cord-cutting” phenomenon at face value, you would have the impression that this is a widespread phenomenon involving millions of consumers canceling their multichannel video subscriptions in favor of online distribution.

Kyle McSlarrow, President & CEO of NCTA, recently sat down for a chat with Nate Anderson of Ars Technica. Anderson has written about that conversation today in a post entitled Cable: let us experiment with metered Internet.

The Cable Show will be in Los Angeles, California next year from May 11-13. See you all there for another exciting Show!

Earlier this week, Cablevision announced Optimum Online Ultra, a new high-speed Internet product that uses the DOCSIS 3.0 standard to deliver speeds up to 101 Mbps.