Posts for 'Shaw'

  • thePlatform Powering shomi and Stan, New SVOD Services in Canada and Australia

    thePlatform has announced that is powering 2 new SVOD services, shomi in Canada and Stan in Australia. shomi was launched in late 2014 by Canadian pay-TV operators Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications. Stan is a join venture of Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media Limited.

    Both SVOD services are using thePlatform's mpx video publishing system for video workflow, metadata management, purchasing support through a payment gateway, subscriber management and viewing rights enforcement, and automated publishing across devices and video players.

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  • Cable's Faster Broadband Speeds Make Google's Fiber Project Look Even Sillier

    Google's recently-announced fiber-to-the-home experiment (which I estimated could cost the company $750 million or more) looks even sillier in the context of continued announcements by cable operators of faster broadband deployments. As an example, this week brought news that Virgin Media, a large U.K. cable operator, is launching 100 megabit/second service by the end of this year, and also intends to expand its trial of 200 megabits/second service. Virgin's announcements came on top of Shaw Communications (a large Canadian cable operator) news from last week that it would soon test expanding its current 100 megabit/second service to 1 gigabit/second, a 10x increase. And big U.S. cable operators themselves continue deploying "DOCSIS 3.0" equipment to offer ever-faster broadband services.

    Google pegged one gigabit as the target for its fiber-to-the-home project, but doesn't the question beg - if cable operators (and telcos) themselves are continuing to improve the speeds of their broadband services to approach 1 gigabit, what is the point of a small, isolated Google experiment? As I pointed out, consumers have benefited from continuous improvements in bandwidth over the years and, even absent net neutrality regulations, enjoy open, unfettered access to all legal content and services. What Google is contributing to the broadband ISP business with its fiber trial remains a complete mystery to me. At some point I have to believe Google shareholders and Wall Street analysts covering the company are going to want more clarity too.

    What do you think? Post a comment now (no sign-in required).

     
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