With Google, AT&T, Sony and an army of other companies gunning to take over the traditional pay TV business using the internet to deliver linear pay TV services, now might be a good time to ask a couple of basic questions. How are pay services from virtual MVPD providers (Sling TV, YouTube TV, Playstation Vue, […]
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The Cloud: Is it the Next Intellectual Property Battleground?
As the smartphone patent war era slows down (with some exception), the next big and unruly intersection of computing tech and intellectual property rights (IPR) is taking place in the cloud. There will likely be less drama than in smartphone litigation, but sorting out IP for cloud computing has the potential to be just as, […]
Wireless Video: Demand vs. Capacity
The forecast for internet video use from Cisco’s annual Visual Network Index continues to astonish. It estimates that, by 2021, 82% of all internet traffic will be video—up from an estimated 73% in 2016. That’s all internet traffic, both wired and wireless. Predictions for wireless video traffic are no less impressive: 78% in 2021 over […]
Hungry Mobile Video: Will Next-Generation TV Feed the Beast?
Bandwidth-hungry video is viewed as an insatiable beast by those who are delivering it over crowded networks. Better compression and mobile network advances have relieved some congestion but the flames of UHD and virtual reality are licking at the heels of cellular networks. TV broadcasters think they can help relieve some of that congestion with […]
Next-Generation TV: What’s Next?
Next-generation TV (aka ATSC 3.0) got top billing at the recently concluded U.S. National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) event and for good reason. The need for broadcasters to adopt a next-gen system—especially one that incorporates a blending of terrestrial broadcast and IP—is obvious especially since everything “television” (more and more an amorphous term) is getting […]
Tech Emerging Markets: IP Owners Cutting New Deals
Variable royalty pricing for the right to use proprietary technologies in high-tech consumer products is a trend that is afoot. While it lacks the drama of the Apple vs. Samsung smartphone patent wars, it is happening for some of the same reasons. Recent developments have both patent-pool licensors and individual companies creating a two-tier royalty […]
Will IP Transform the Broadcast Industry?
It might be argued that the difference between new video-service providers and the old ones (broadcast via cable, satellite and terrestrial) is that the new ones are simply using a different pipe (Internet) to get content into homes and to personal devices. This is true to a point but, of course, overly simplistic. There are […]
Is 2017 the Year of UHD?
Hopefully TV suppliers and the content community learned their lesson in the great home 3D debacle. It goes something like this: Don’t promise a transformative and improved viewing experience unless you can deliver it. So now the industry is coalescing behind Ultra High Definition (UHD) as the next-generation in-home transformative viewing experience. When the “next […]
3D Printing: Who Owns the Designs?
Most people have a narrow image of 3D printing: Hobbyists extruding plastic trinkets on slow-moving 3D printers as the ubiquitous cat quizzically hovers over the printer. However, 3D printing—more accurately labeled additive manufacturing (the layering of materials is an additive, not reductive, process)—is a more serious business with serious implications for intellectual property rights. On […]
Do You Know Where Your Personal Data Is?
A recent intellectual property and licensing conference got me rethinking about the ownership of personal data. I say “rethinking” because I assumed that ship sailed long ago with Big Data Inc.—Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.—securely at the helm. After all, most of us have turned over the rights to our personal information a long time ago […]