Tech Discussions

Some interesting 2012 Internet usage statistics have been moving around the blogosphere this week. One that stood out was that North America has the highest Internet penetration of any region in the world.

As we at NCTA gear up for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, we wanted to share that we will be keeping you on top of key show moments related to cable, television, and telecom (and yes – all the cool gadgets) as the show progresses.

This morning, NCTA President & CEO Michael Powell was on CNBC’s Squawk Box to talk about the fiscal cliff, investments by the communications industry and the regulatory environment after the election.

While much of the United States focuses on the Presidential election this week, the global Internet engineering community will be in Atlanta tackling a host of issues that will echo throughout the world.

The final day of the 2012 Cable Show kicked off this morning with the last general session. To get the session started, Piers Morgan sat down for a one on one interview with Conan O’Brien to discuss his move away from traditional television to an online media empire.

The second day of the 2012 Cable Show gets underway with the second general session. The session got off to a start with Verizon announcing a new content discovery service as part of a discussion of content delivery and consumption.

The 2012 Cable Show kicks off this morning in Boston, and over the next three days, cable will showcase it’s best programming, newest technologies, and the incredible array of ways to consume and interact with content.

Yesterday, NCTA hosted an event at our offices to help educate about the impact of the March 2011 earthquake on the telecommunications infrastructure of Japan. Representatives from the Japanese Embassy here in Washington and executives from NTT East, a leading Japanese telecom provider, described the damage of both the quake and the ensuing damage of the massive tsunami that followed, efforts to repair and replace equipment and facilities and the lessons they learned that can be used to prepare for future incidents.

Recently, my son, who will attend college in the fall to study computer science, called me down to his basement lair to show me the new interface offered by the Xbox console.

In November of last year, the U.S. cable industry announced an initiative to improve the energy efficiency of cable set-top boxes. A major part of this initiative was the launch of a new facility within CableLabs – cable’s R&D consortium – that will focus on initiatives to improve energy efficiency, called CableLabs – Energy Lab.

The FCC is considering a change in its rule on basic tier encryption, which currently requires cable systems to provide their basic service tier “in the clear.” There’s been quite a lot of public discussion of the issue this month and some of the elements can be confusing.

Back in June, on the eve of NCTA’s annual conference, it was clear that a theme had emerged for The Cable Show.  As I wrote on this blog, we were entering “a new world in which Consumer Electronics, Information Technology and Hollywood” have come together into order to deliver our customers new and powerful ways of consuming entertainment and information.

We’ve already seen media coverage this week with headlines like “Web Running Out of Addresses.” If you’ve read reports like these, you’re aware of the Internet’s transition to a new set of IP addresses which will continue to connect the massive number of new computers, mobile phones and countless other gadgets.

If you were one of the 145,000 visitors to the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, you couldn’t have swung an iPad without hitting one of the thousands of Internet-enabled “smart” TV and other devices that are transforming the consumer video marketplace.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the cable industry has deployed switched digital video (SDV) as a means of conserving bandwidth, allowing us to provide better and more services to our customers.  As the FCC examines the future of set-top boxes and the current CableCARD regime, TiVo has raised a question about whether the Tuning Adapter (which it helped develop) is a satisfactory approach to enable consumers with TiVo one-way devices to access cable programming delivered via SDV.