Mari Silbey

Mari’s tech career started when she became the default “IT guy” in her first job out of college. Since leaving help-desk duties to the experts, she’s focused on trends in technology as a consultant, writer, reporter, analyst and at-home gadget tinkerer. Her current paid gig is with the non-profit organization US Ignite where she focuses on how networks and digital technologies impact smart cities. All posts on ZNF represent her own opinions and not those of US Ignite. Mari is a sucker for anything in the digital media space and covers interesting happenings in cable, telecom, and whatever else she feels like. Find her on Twitter at @msilbey.

TV for the ADD Generation

Being a glutton for punishment, I recorded a few of the demos and screenshots shown during Paul Kagan’s “Getting Personal” conference last week in conjunction with the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo. (I’ve gotten in trouble for posting “confidential” video demos shown at conferences before.) This one comes from Ensequence, showing off some interactive TV apps used … Read more

Comcast is Going All-Digital

Todd Spangler at Multichannel broke the news this morning. Comcast is buying up to six million digital terminal adapters (DTAs) this year in an effort to migrate to all-digital broadcasts throughout 20% of its footprint in 2008. The DTAs are coming from Motorola (my employer), Pace and Thomson. DTAs work by converting QAM channels broadcast … Read more

Can and Should RedLasso Survive?

The idea behind RedLasso is deceptively simple. The service lets bloggers search and share TV clips online. Unfortunately, once you get past that one-line description, things get a lot more complicated. What about copyright? Distribution agreements? Who should get paid for content reuse? After sitting down with RedLasso’s CEO Kenyon Hayward, I came to two conclusions. First, most people are looking at RedLasso from the wrong angle. And second, if TV networks don’t start signing deals with the company, they’ll find they have to build or buy an equivalent service in the near future anyway.

Above everything else, I now think of RedLasso as a reference tool. The company catalogs broadcast content and brings it to a platform (the Web) suitable for searching and sorting. Broadcasters should love this. It creates a way for them to monetize chunks of their content without having to do a speck of work. You know all that money broadcasters have made off traditional syndication deals? RedLasso gives them an opportunity to do the same thing on the Web, but with news instead of entertainment, and in a format that works for the online world – short clips supported by embedded advertising from video ad networks.

So why are the networks sending RedLasso cease-and-desist letters? Ken Hayward makes clear that RedLasso isn’t interested in replaying network shows for free online, and raw content is only available for a limited period of time. Presumably the networks are concerned because they’re still hung up on the control issue. It’s their content after all. Shouldn’t the networks get control over how it’s used?

The answer of course is: not anymore. Ceding control to viewers is what has made Web video so popular. And the fact that RedLasso can help the networks make money on such a turbulent platform should be appealing. If the networks don’t recognize that now, they’ll likely come to understand it as Web video viewing continues to skyrocket in the coming months and years.

Now here’s the reality check. RedLasso has a lot going for it, including huge viewership numbers, but it’s got a lot of obstacles too. Even with the money the company’s raised, it’s bringing in no revenue right now because it won’t roll ads until content deals are in place. It can keep going for a while, but given how notoriously slow-moving big media is, the question arises: Can RedLasso survive long enough to bring the networks on board and achieve real legitimacy?

Kagan Conference – Interactive TV Tech

Are we finally ready for iTV? Maybe I’ll find out today at the Kagan conference on “Interactive TV Technology and Targeted Advertising.” Anyone else attending? Give me a shout at marisilbey (at) comcast dot net.

Redlasso and the Comcast Coincidence

Earlier this week I sat down with Redlasso CEO Kenyon Hayward for an update on the Redlasso business and the company’s ongoing negotiating process with big media networks. There’s much to write about on that front, but since I won’t get to that today, I thought in the meantime I’d share a bizarre coincidence I … Read more

Hulu Days of Summer

Whether or not you believe Hulu can “kick YouTube’s ass,” the folks behind the Web video venture are certainly doing more than a few things right. I got hooked on Hulu when it was still in beta, checking out a few 30 Rock episodes and some of the Scrubs shows I’d missed. But I admit … Read more

Why Care about WiMAX?

There’s been a lot of WiMAX chatter the last couple of months. For example, the major announcement in May of new financial backers for a US network (Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Google, Intel and Bright House). And yesterday came the much lower-profile, but still highly-important news of the first successful round of WiMAX certifications by the WiMAX Forum. Certification means interoperability, which is critical for any large-scale deployment.

Amid the flurry of recent WiMAX coverage, it’s been difficult to pin down the important facts for Joe Q. Public. After all, what normal person really is interested in spectrum frequencies? 700 MHz or 2.5 GHz – who cares as long as it means high-speed wireless Internet access?

Here are some of the important conclusions I’ve arrived at, several with the help of Paul Kapustka’s “Game On, WiMAX!” report. This is what consumers in the US should be interested in and what WiMAX has going for it.

What should matter to consumers:

Per-use payment options – No requirement to pay a WiMAX monthly service fee if you’re only going to connect once or twice a month
Handsets don’t have to be subsidized, meaning you’ll be able to buy anything WiMAX-certified at retail and automatically have Internet access
The new Clearwire service will use mobile WiMAX instead of fixed WiMAX, which means you can literally stay connected while moving at high speed down a highway (Side note: Interestingly, I heard major pessimism around mobile WiMAX from one large industry analyst firm earlier this year. Premature reaction?)
Nationwide network – before the new investors got on board, it wasn’t clear if WiMAX could scale beyond a few metro areas; now a nationwide build-out is assumed
“[Some] observers see WiMAX silicon getting small and cheap enough to find its way into a wide range of consumer gear, such as digital cameras — which might also have their broadband connectivity built into the purchase price, like Amazon’s Kindle book reader.” -Sidecut Reports

What WiMAX has going for it:

New Comcast HQ – An IMAX Theater in the Lobby

I took my first trip over to the new Comcast HQ yesterday for a meeting and was duly impressed. Smack in the middle of Philadelphia, the site is nothing like Verizon’s HQ, a sprawling campus in Basking Ridge. Instead, the building goes straight up; a little cafe with water fountains sprinkling the landscape outside. Indoors … Read more