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Viodi View Newsletter - September 14, 2005
Indie Telco Local
Content Workshop Advertisement
By Ken Pyle, ken.pyle@viodi.com, Managing Editor, Viodi View
- Instant Voice, Data and Video
- Telcos Responding to Disaster
- First Responders Honored
- FCC: Under the Radar
- More of the Same
- An Easy Way to Have Your Voice Heard
- Mini Book Review – USTA’s IP Video Implementation and Planning Guide
- Conferences of Note
- The Skype-EBay Hype or Is It?
- Krazy Ken's Korner - The Remote Control Generation
Humbling is the word that comes to mind when thinking about the devastation caused by hurricane Katrina. The fragility of society and the vulnerability of our technology-dependent infrastructure were exposed by this mammoth disaster. As much as we try to control our climates and environment, an event like this shows how powerless humans are against the forces of nature. Bad decisions and poor judgment become amplified and even the right decisions at the right time are sometimes just not enough.
| Instant Voice, Data and Video Network The mass destruction of the communications infrastructure through the combination of wind, flood and resulting loss of electricity presented a major challenge to the recovery efforts. Hurricane Katrina points to the importance of providing tools for First Responders which allow them to create self-discovering, ad-hoc communications’ networks that require as little of the existing infrastructure as possible. Click here to hear and see an interview with Keith Money of F4W, a company creating the aforementioned networks. |
A Must-Watch for Anyone Involved in Emergency Relief Planning |
Disasters like hurricane Katrina also provide opportunities for people to help people. As would be expected, independent telcos and their organizations have been leading the way to help each other and their communities. A few of the efforts noted over the last couple of weeks include:
Telcos Responding to Disaster:
The encouraging thing is that the independent telcos on the front line of providing services to evacuees report that the support they have received, in the form of money and donated goods, has been overwhelming. They are working with their communities to find their guests homes and jobs. |
Hurricane Katrina made it clear that disaster relief
begins with First Responders. Coincidentally, Sierra Telephone
held an event last Friday honoring First Responders and
Veterans. People were brought to tears by a rendition of
God Bless America from a traveling Indian
Children’s Christian choir. The above images provide
a flavor for the event. |
Speaking of people without homes, Donna Neville of MTA Productions reports that they escaped New Orleans before the storm and made it to Panama City, Florida. They have temporary housing in a condominium, but they will need more permanent digs. They also need jobs and projects. Avid readers of the Viodi View will recall MTA productions from an earlier article about a television show called Rajun Sexy Cajuns.
| These hunting shows provide a flavor for life in the swamps of Louisiana, as the hosts do crazy things such as wrestle alligators and hunt wild boar with bows and arrows. They even produced a cooking show where Mama La Roux would cook what the Rajun Sexy Cajuns hosts would catch. It seems like there should be a home for this sort of programming on some VOD system or cable channel, like the Sportsman Channel or the Outdoor Channel. |  |
I am sure that MTA could come up with some interesting promotional opportunities to complement this programming. Contact Donna Neville directly at Mtaproduction@aol.com for licensing information.
An unheralded Federal agency that appears to be making every effort to do what it can to speed the recovery effort has been the FCC. Almost every day for the past few weeks, there have been notices easing regulatory burdens to make it easier for communications companies to rebuild the telecom infrastructure. They even kept their offices open last weekend to make sure that they would not be a roadblock in the recovery and rebuilding process. Kudos to the FCC.
Maybe one of the things the FCC was working on last weekend was its 43 page SHVERA Section 208 Report to Congress. This report was a requirement of the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act of 2004. It requires the FCC to report on the state of competition in the multichannel video programming distribution market with regards to retransmission consent, network non-duplication, syndicated exclusivity and sports black out rules. It examines the rules surrounding those issues and how they impact rural cable carriers.
I found this document to be a good resource for providing background on some of the pretty arcane rules that have been promulgated through the years. In the end, the FCC recommended no changes to any of the statutory provisions referred to in the Report. Pioneer Telephone was the only telephone company that responded directly to the FCC’s call for comments and replies, so the representation of the viewpoints of independent telcos was somewhat limited in this particular report.
An Easy Way to Have Your Voice Heard
It is a challenge to find the time to respond with comments to the FCC, so the OPASTCO Video and Broadband Committee has made it easy to respond to another notice of FCC inquiry. Independent Telcos, be on the lookout for an email in the next day or so which will include a link to a brief survey that was put together by OPASTCO’s Video and Broadband committee. The results of these surveys will be compiled and included in a response to the FCC. All individual responses will be kept anonymous.
Mini Book Review – USTA’s IP Video Implementation and Planning Guide
One of the things I miss about most conferences is that most no longer provide proceedings books. These were always great post-conference resources as they included white papers from the speakers. The advent of electronic presentation tools, like PowerPoint, has probably been the biggest factor in the decline of these great resources.
So, my first impression of USTA’s IP Video Implementation and Planning Guide is it reminds me of a proceedings book. It really is a collection of white papers covering virtually all topics associated with IPTV; from marketing to content acquisition to signal transport to operations to system security. As such, it provides a pretty comprehensive view of the current IPTV landscape in its 235 pages.
Most of the 14 chapters are fairly technical and intended for Engineers. The chapters by Geoff Burke of Calix and Suzanne Rainey, Guy Petty and Marc W. Cutten of Accord Media focus on the content and marketing aspects of IPTV and are a good primer for anyone employed by a telco.
Kevin Schneider, CTO of Adtran,
provides an interesting cost comparison between Fiber to the Node and
Fiber to the Premise architectures. I would have liked to seen the point-to-point
Fiber to the Premise architecture added to this comparison. At $75 ($60
for USTA members), USTA’s IP Video Implementation and Planning
Guide is a must-have for any telco, whether
or not they already provide video services, as it will be a great
training resource for individuals in those companies who want
to learn more about IPTV.
Conferences
of Note:
After a restful summer, it looks like conference season is back in full swing. I am sure many of the authors in the aforementioned book will be speaking at some of the shows highlighted in this next article. Click here to see some of my thoughts on some of these upcoming events, such as Digital Hollywood, CTIA, Telecom 05, Parks Associates Fall Focus, Streaming Media West and Telco TV.
Whether speaking to friends or telcos, I have been shocked at how many technically astute people have been unaware of the free Voice over IP provider, Skype. This despite the 50+ million registered users and 150+ million downloads for this relatively new peer-to-peer voice service. I guess this should not be too surprising as my wife and I still have never used eBay, a company that claims over 100 million registered users.
The point is that both of these services have probably just scratched the surface of their potential. Who knows what new service set will result from this combination of eBay, their subsidiary PayPal and Skype, but it will probably be competitive in some way with what telcos provide or plan on providing. Telcos should definitely check out the Skype service - the audio quality is amazing and conference calling could not be easier. You can find Skype now by going to eBay.com.
Krazy Ken’s Korner: The Remote Control Generation
One of the things about technology is it makes instant gratification possible. The Internet, cell phones and cable television all contribute to this feeling of power of being able to control some little part of the big world. When a disaster like hurricane Katrina hits, the smooth operation of day-to-day living is disrupted, instant gratification is no more and it is easy to see how frustrations can mount as what were once simple endeavors become difficult.
The remote control might be considered a catalyst that sparked the instant gratification generation. Now a standard feature of any television set, the remote control was, in the not so distant past, available only to the “rich”. The lowly remote control enables the navigation of video on demand or 100+ channel video systems. Without the remote control, the breadth and depth of programming networks would probably not be economically possible as the cost of accessing channels would be too high (imagine having to get up off the couch every time you had to change channels).
The remote control is both a blessing and a curse as it allows us to find the programming we want much faster -- it takes away the friction of finding information - but it also allows us to filter information based on our biases. Don't like what you are hearing, just change the channel until you find an opinion that matches what you want to hear. This probably was not the intent of the inventors of the remote control. They were probably just trying to sell televisions.
| To see how they tried to sell televisions back then, check out Roger Bindl’s video, the “RC”. He mixes humor, archived commercials and a little bit of Wisconsin rap to provide an entertaining and informative stroll down the remote control memory lane. |
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