Viodi View - April 25th, 2007 Issue

News – there is too much of it, or at least too much bad news. In general, the Viodi View tries to accentuate the positive, as Mr. Crosby once said, and comment on the things that others might have missed in the context of telecom and content. Further, the focus of the Viodi View and ViodiTV is on independent telcos and their efforts to create and distribute video. This publication and the associated events Viodi is involved with would not be possible without all of the help we receive from our friends. The Korner has more details on all of the great help our friends gave us in the past few weeks.

In addition, we always look forward to feedback and encourage our readers to forward our articles to their friends and colleagues. We have been trying to make the discussions more interactive by posting articles to ViodiTV, where we have implemented “comments”. We have also started posting articles on ViodiTV in between issues of the Viodi View.

Roger Bindl provides excellent video coverage of the IP Possibilities conference co-produced by NTCA and OPASTCO. With dozens of sessions featuring industry leaders, it is difficult to encapsulate such a comprehensive conference on everything IP, but Roger manages to capture some very interesting highlights from speakers such as John Rose of OPASTCO, Rob Riordan of nSight, Bob Howard-Anderson of Occam Networks, Anthony Bontranger of Axis Partners and Bill Blessing of Embarq.

With over 108,000 attendees, NAB has something for everyone when it comes to video. It has more press people (north of 1,200) than most of the shows Viodi normally attends. What surprised me was the number of suppliers with IPTV or IPTV-derivative products.

During an April 18th telebriefing, the Yankee Group predicted a proliferation of WiMAX enabled CE devices in 2008-09. The hypothesis is that WiMAX device strategies aim to disrupt the status quo for service distribution- away from traditional CPE (modems, integrated adapters for notebook PCs) and into Consumer Electronics products (new gadgets). While low cost computing devices (e.g. $100 Computers) will be critical for emerging market economies, it is unclear whether integrated WiMAX will be chosen over current WiFi solutions. –

Roger’s post on the Wisconsin Franchise bill sparked comments, some published at the post, some sent privately to me, regarding the process, and how fast this bill moving through the Wisconsin legislature.

I heard from one telco friend, who will remain anonymous, who suggested that an AT&T representative made a comment to the affect that, "This bill [the WI State Franchise Bill] has over 70% chance of passing and we are committing over 15 full time lobbyists [confirmed in this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article] and we will smear the rest of you guys tomorrow with statewide ads of being anti-consumer and not competitive if you vote to not support it here today."

I had a chance to speak with Ron Laudner of Farmers Telephone, Josh Nelson of Great Lakes Telephone and Dave Erickson of FreeConferenceCall.com last week. They spent the latter part of last week lobbying the FCC to help them bring AT&T and the other large carriers to the table to discuss the issue that these carriers have with these conference call providers.

Call blocking, reported in an earlier issue of the Viodi View, no longer seems to be occurring with these service providers. These independent telcos are concerned about something much harder to quantify. They are concerned about the degradation of the Iowa telephone network due to carriers routing it via more congested routes. They have noticed things such as long call set-up times (up to 30 seconds) that is impacting Iowa telephone traffic beyond just their conference calling services.

Look for the big carriers to part ways with their smaller cousins at the State Association level as well. Two of the larger carriers have left at least one of the State Telephone Associations. All of these developments point to a world of changing alliances and the sharing of legacy networks (copper plant) no longer means a politically aligned future.

Here are some of the conferences where in the next month or two Viodi may have some presence. I recommend them all and hope to see lots of the Viodi View readers and ViodiTV viewers at these events.

I ran into Chuck Van Dusen at NAB, the technical guru behind many of the video encoders deployed by independent telcos. He is now an independent consultant.

I also had the good fortune to run into Leslie Ellis. Leslie is a long-time contributor to the Multichannel News and CTAM. I recommend her web site, Translation Please, as a good resource to cut through all of the techno-babble.

So much of what I do is by the seat of my pants. If not for friends to keep me grounded, I might just fly off into space. The Video Production Crash Course last week is the latest example of life on the edge. I owe a very big thanks to Roger Bindl for his willingness to jump into crazy ventures with me. Sean, Lee Ann, Mark and John of Lightbulb Communications also have my sincere appreciation for making the Video Production Crash Course a reality.

Tony Wild of Kalona Telephone exemplified the typical independent telco with his great attitude and willingness to help in any way possible. I also owe a great deal of debt to all of the speakers; Angela, Bridget, Vaughn, Tony, JR, Dave, John, Rob, Giles, Matt, Ankit, Stephen, David and Glen. Thanks.

What really impressed me was the willingness of suppliers to help complete our Video Production Studio –

Thanks Bogen Imaging for the use of the Tripod.
Thanks Sony for the use of the HDV camera
Thanks JR Reid Lighting for the lighting set-up

A special thanks to John Stapsy and his colleagues at datavideo. John discussed the challenges of live production in his presentation at the Workshop. Datavideo also provided us with switching and recording equipment that allowed us to demonstrate real-live production at the Video Production Crash Course. The datavideo people impressed me with both their flexibility and their efforts at making the tradeshow experience fun, as evidenced by the following video clip.

This clip is sort of a metaphor for the Viodi life. Cheers!

Click to Watch Video