January 2011

By now, most Americans have taken the leap and tossed out their old boxy televisions in favor of sleek flat-panel displays. Now manufacturers want to convince those people that their once-futuristic sets are already obsolete.

After a period of strong growth, sales of televisions are slowing. To counter this, TV makers are trying to persuade consumers to buy new sets by promoting new technologies. At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, which opens Thursday, every TV maker will be crowing about things like 3-D and Internet connections — features that have not generated much excitement so far. Unit sales of liquid-crystal and plasma displays were up 2.9 percent in 2010 from the previous year, according to figures from the market researcher DisplaySearch. That is tiny compared with the gains of more than 20 percent in each of the prior three years. Those heady days of the last decade were the result of an unusual set of circumstances. The rise of flat-panel television technologies like plasma and LCD almost perfectly coincided with a government-mandated switchover to digital broadcasting and the availability of high-definition shows and movies — something these new televisions were all ready to display. That sparked a mass migration of consumers from using the old cathode-ray tube television sets to the thinner and lighter plasma and liquid-crystal displays.

The Cisco Videoscape platform encompasses an IP-based media gateway for the integration of voice, linear and online video, high-speed data, Wi-Fi and network traffic routing; the Videoscape IP set-top box, to support all video forms delivered to a TV; software clients that extend the services to a variety of home and mobile devices, from connected TVs to tablets and smartphones; and the Videoscape Media Suite, which provides content lifecycle management.

Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers emphasized that the Videoscape vision -- which ties together elements across Cisco's divisions, including IP set-tops, the umi videoconferencing system and Flip camera -- is not about an individual set-top or device, but rather a software architecture. He also reiterated that Cisco will work with operator customers to deliver the converged technologies to consumers. "It's not about devices, in our opinion, it's about the intelligence in the network -- it's a software architectural announcement," Chambers said. "The Videoscape experience is about how you have an infinite source of content -- how do you allow any device, over any network, to [access] content it's authorized to get." He added that 75% to 80% of Cisco's investment in Videoscape is in software.

The idea: to let service providers counter over-the-top services, by integrating Internet-delivered content and services seamlessly across multiple screens. "The customer will say, ‘I really want to align with the service provider on this,' instead of going to five or six different providers," Chambers said.Cisco is currently working with several major global service provider customers, including Australian telecommunications company Telstra, to enable next-generation video experiences through the Videoscape platform. SNL Kagan analyst Ian Olgeirson said Cisco's deliberate operator-oriented approach -- with the vendor disavowing a retail play for over-the-top devices -- would give it an advantage over competitors that are targeting consumers directly. "It is a nice way for Cisco to present all the things they've been cobbling together for years," he said.

A Q&A with Scott Kamber who heads KamberLaw. He's a high-profile lawyer who’s at the heart of the small, but growing, world of online privacy lawsuits and may be best known in privacy circles for leading the litigation against Facebook’s Beacon Ad program.

In recent months, Kamber has filed a series of class action lawsuits alleging various privacy violations on the part of Internet companies. He’s sued interclick and its customers for ‘browser history sniffing’ and improperly using Flash cookies to track users; Quantcast and Clearspring over different allegations of misusing Flash cookies (they settled); and Apple and Google over other privacy issues. In an interview with paidContent, Kamber talked about why he’s suing these firms and also explained why he believes litigation is an effective tool to protect users’ privacy online.

[Commentary] More than a quarter of Americans do not have home Internet access and more than a third lack a high-speed, broadband connection. Compared to 30 other industrialized countries, the U.S. ranks fifteenth in broadband quality and penetration. The most egregious disparities are predictable: The poor, the disabled, minorities, and seniors have abysmal rates of broadband use. Ostensibly the most powerful, prosperous, technologically advanced country in the world has left over a fourth of its citizens disconnected.

President Obama has made closing this digital divide a priority. In December 2008, when he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he declared that we would “renew our information superhighway.” The $787 billion stimulus allotted $7.2 billion for the increase of broadband use in rural and underserved areas, and mandated the creation of a National Broadband Plan (NBP) by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to devise a way to connect 100 million more Americans -- a third of the U.S. population -- with affordable broadband by 2020. It has been nine months since the NBP was delivered to Congress, and those billions of dollars have been spent. And yet, we are only slightly better off than we were at the outset. Achieving better Internet access will not be easy, but widespread broadband access is essential. For every person like my father who has opted out of the Internet revolution, there are communities of people who are scrambling to catch up.