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, […]
Archive | Digital Tech Consulting
Pressure Builds On Hisense To Give Up Sharp TV Brand
The ongoing battle between Foxconn-led Sharp Electronics and Chinese TV maker Hisense continues unabated as Sharp piles on litigation. Sharp has filed complaints against alleged Hisense product development practices as well as claimed misuse of the Sharp TV brand that Hisense licenses in the U.S. market. At the same time, further pressure on Hisense is […]
Will the Cord Cutters Come Back?
The pay TV industry in the U.S. has been reeling under a brutal period of subscriber loss. Meanwhile, like sharks smelling chum, rival over-the-top video services continue to pop up. Disney is the latest example of the trend. The entertainment behemoth told investors in August that it will pull its movies from Netflix to start […]
UHD Blu-ray’s Narrow Opportunity Window
My wife loved Wonder Woman. No, to paraphrase Woody Allen, love is too weak a word for how she feels about the initial adventures of the Amazon princess—she luuurved it, she loaved it, she luffed it (two Fs, yes). She l’ed Wonder Woman so much, we’ve seen it three times in the theater. (I am […]
The Internet of Things Next Thing
What do you think of when you think of the Internet of Things (IoT)? For many of us, it’s tiny wearables reminding us that we sit too much (and eat too much and drink too much) or thermostats that are easier to program than the 1970s-era monstrosities they’ve replaced. Toothbrushes, running shorts and doorbells have […]
Will Indian Smartphone Suppliers Get Home Territory Back?
Now that the title of the fastest-growing smartphone market has been passed on to India from China, it seems logical that Indian mobile phone brands would be making significant market-share gains. After all, the Chinese market has been dominated by global and domestic Chinese brands. In India, however, major Indian smartphone suppliers were absent from […]
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, […]
Will the FCC Put the U.S. Back on the Information Slow Lane?
With a new U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman in place, new policy proposals are emerging. The U.S. has always been a bit of a laggard compared to other developed economies when it comes to the availability of suitably fast “broadband” connections. But there has been recent progress in upping those speeds—now from 4Mbps downloads […]
The Coming 1K/2K to 4K Upconversion Disconnect
A couple of months back I received a distressed email from a reader. It seems he bought a new 4K TV and eagerly hooked up his DVD player, believing his new UHD would make his old DVDs look lovely. You can guess the inevitable: disastrous results. Imagine blowing up a postage stamp-sized photo to billboard […]
U.S. IPTV Providers Are No Longer Bucking the Trend
U.S. cable and satellite TV providers have been buffeted in recent years by subscriber loss. Indeed, the only segment in the U.S. pay TV market in the past several years to routinely post net subscriber gains have been the IPTV providers—principally AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS. But the telco run of subscriber gains that marked […]