BGR Blog
Tim’s Top 10 List, nah, Make it 12
Why does Letterman have all the fun? It's August, it's slow, and the fish ain't biting. Tim's Top 10 List, nah, Make it 1
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Over-the-Top Is Off the Hook
Yet another day, yet another acronym for us cable-philes. Over-the-Top. This one I like. And I don't. At the same time. Kind of like being a Washington Redskins fan over the past decade.
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Who’s Got the Juice?
A legitimate question…
For us publisher-types, trade shows and conferences usually have us drooling. All those potential customers and advertisers in one place, all those contacts and big-wigs we can schmooze with. I love trade shows, although in 15 years I have yet to attend the “perfect” trade show. Many have come close. For the average [...]
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Cablevision Everywhere
The Reuters report on Cablevision Systems’ call on its quarterly results suggests that the operator is continuing its tradition of thinking outside the (cable) box. The report says that the company is testing technology that will enable it to provide, in the words of President Tom Rutledge, “everything we offer” to any screen-enabled, IP-connected device in the home.
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
When You Lack a Choice…Keep Your Expectations Low
A huge chasm exists between our leading MSOs when it comes to face-to-face technician/installer customer service. This has always been an issue for me, because the quality we get here in our Virginia home compared to the service at our summer rental property borders on the difference between seeing Aerosmith in 1975 and seeing them [...]
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
The Holy Grail of Broadband Technology
Vendor sales people across the country speak of it only in the dark of night. Some dare not speak its name at all. After all, this fleeting digital apparition appears mainly during MSO budgeting season (which is right now for the main operators) and then recedes into its hermitage where sales reps across the globe [...]
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Note to Cable Operators: Change is the Only Constant
It’s difficult to give up on something that’s been good to you, be it a nice pair of Levis or a great old car. But moving on, at least to some degree, is what the telephone industry is facing as its T1 business slows in favor of carrier Ethernet.
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Little White Cables for You and Me
OK. If you are lucky enough to live in the Hoosier state, you have a bounty of good fortune. A perennially good football team (despite a not-so-smart coach), the Indy 500, John Mellencamp, Farm Aid, the occasional tornado (admit it … you want to see one too), friendly people, great history, The Jackson 5, amber [...]
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
I Attempt – And Fail – To Answer the Big Question
So this question knocked me out: "Why do you have 'Broadband' in your title if you're a cable telecom website? Broadband isn't cable. Broadband is telephony." Uhhh...ok....
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to tru2way
A generation of high end televisions incorporating tru2way would have constituted a big step toward eliminating set-top boxes and more widely disseminating consistent electronic program guides and other applications. For the most part, the TV guys didn’t play along...
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Alive on Planet X
The X-Men, X-Rays, The X-Factor, Generation X, X (the band for those of you who went to college in the eighties), XTC (ditto), Racer X (who, incidentally, was so much cooler than Speed Racer), X marks the spot. And now...xfinity or XFINITY.
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Acronymplistic. That’s Me.
EBIF.
What?
Here I am, walking around the show floor at NCTA, minding my own business, when EBIF rears its little profitable head. What the hell is EBIF? It practically ran up and bit me on the leg. I just finished learning about QAM, DOCSIS-with-a dot-not a point, GPON, FTTX, FTTH, QoE, QoS, yada yada. Now this one sounds just as important.
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
There is Nothing New Under the Sun
Cable operators, programmers, developers and vendors are resourceful.
That point was driven home – again – by the research that I’ve done during the past week or so on EBIF, the Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format.
Even a few years ago, when a lot of the set-top boxes (STBs) in the industry were deployed, the [...]
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
3D: Beware of Legacy Thinking
The focus on 3D at last week’s Cable Show in Los Angeles was reminiscent of the mid 1990s, when high definition was the next big thing. The entire ecosystem — set vendors, application developers, programmers, cable operators and others — want 3D to have the same happy fate as HD. Despite the superficial similarities, however, today’s far more complex world means that such success is no slam dunk.
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Brian Roberts Look Out!
You have competition, sir.
My 10-year-old son is not your normal kid. Granted he likes football (Redskins thankfully) doesn’t like girls, loves video games, hates homework, and has every Lego toy imaginable. And when he had to present who his personal idol was at school, he presented me, his old man. I floated for a [...]
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
3DTV N U N ME N NCTA
Acronyms combined with tweet-language - can it get any better? Oh yes it can. After what seemed to be a fairly light afternoon on Tuesday, the Cable Show roared on Wednesday with a packed house - and the big buzz - from one end of the floor to the other, was 3D.
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Cable Changes with the Times
It’s a pleasure to again be fully engaged with the cable industry after many years of sporadic coverage. Absolutely no industry is as fun and as quirky as cable, which has managed to maintain a small town feel even as it has grown into a huge metropolis.
This may not be the smoothest segueway, but it [...]
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
The LA Express
...and it all starts next week. And it will go by in a flash. Possibly in 3DTV... Many people have wondered about the dividing of annual cable trade shows into two big events - Cable Connects Spring and Cable Connects Fall. And while I cover mostly the vendor community in this blog, I have seen the pros and cons.
Come Back Soon…
Writers. I give them credit. Making a living out of words - and crafted words at that - is an enviable living. One that I doubt I could ever do. Oftentimes it's a tough gig, and when you are a journalist specializing in a specific vertical discipline like sports, business, or technology, it can get downright ruthless.
Posted in BGR Blog Comments closed
Putting a Contract Out on Contractors