Posts for 'Cisco'

  • Cisco Invests in Digitalsmiths to Boost Eos Social Media Platform

    Digitalsmiths is announcing this morning that Cisco has invested an undisclosed amount in the company. The deal adds onto Digitalsmiths' $12M Series B round from a couple months ago, led by .406 Ventures. Digitalsmiths has been building momentum in the video indexing and content management/publishing space and the Cisco investment is a nice validation for the company, particularly in this bruising economic climate. I talked to Digitalsmiths' (which is a VideoNuze sponsor) CEO/co-founder Ben Weinberger on Friday to learn more.

    The deal was shepherded by the Cisco Media Solutions Group, which recently announced the general availability of its Eos (Entertainment Operating System) social media platform at CES. This follows a period of relative quiet for Eos. Almost 2 years ago I moderated an NAB Show Super Session panel which included Dan Scheinman, the SVP/GM of CMSG who was then just beginning to talk about Eos.

    As Ben explained it, Digitalsmiths' indexing and video management will allow Eos to offer more advanced, targeted advertising capabilities to its customers. That certainly puts it in line with marketers' increasing desire for maximum context and ROI for their dollar. Improved navigation and a strong focus on monetization have been two critical Digitalsmiths' competitive differentiators.

    At a broader level, Ben described how other Cisco groups began taking interest in Digitalsmiths during the due diligence process. In particular, the idea of Digitalsmiths-generated video metadata and indexing could become an interesting fit for Cisco's other products (remember that through its 2005 acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta, Cisco became one of the biggest suppliers of set-top boxes to video service providers. Cisco's also a leading maker of broadband access/routing infrastructure and in-home networks through Linksys).

    Still, realizing this value is well down the road and will require working across multiple groups each with multiple priorities. For example, anything involving advanced advertising in the cable industry will also have to align with the growing role that Canoe is going to play in the industry. For now the upside of the Digitalsmiths investment is in how Eos leverages the company's technology.

    Eos is a newcomer to the social media platform space, which has evolved considerably over the last two years. KickApps, Pluck and others have made a lot of headway in the media and entertainment vertical Eos is targeting; other verticals like sports, brand marketing and enterprise have also recently started to grow.

    I have to admit that even after watching this almost year-old video of Dan explaining Eos, I'm still not sure I fully understand the role of Eos as a standalone offering from Cisco, especially when I read recently that its business model is a combination of a "nominal license fee and an ad revenue split." I mean, is there really enough financial upside in a hosted social media platform for mighty Cisco (fiscal Q1 '09 revenues of $10.3B) to pursue it? It's also worth asking whether Cisco has sufficient core software platform development competencies in this area. Certainly Cisco has plenty of financial muscle to back Eos, but is that enough to succeed in the crowded and scrappy social media space?

    Yet another piece of this to consider is how players like Facebook and MySpace fit in at the intersection of social media and video. While neither is offering a white label platform (nor do I expect them to), last week's CNN/Facebook inauguration effort exposed the possibility that some major media companies may simply try to marry their video to these existing audiences. I've been a big fan of making broadband video more engaging through social applications but I'm cognizant that doing so is easier said than done. With resources increasingly scarce, some media companies may need to rethink how social they can afford to be.

    For Eos, incorporating Digitalsmiths effectively would be a big help and could lay the foundation for other Cisco groups to benefit down the road as well. If Cisco's truly committed to the social media platform space this story will unfold over many years.

    What do you think? Post a comment now.

     
  • Here Comes Sling.com

    Does the world need another broadband video aggregation site for premium quality video content?

    The answer to that question will start to come early next week when Sling.com, the latest entrant in this already crowded space, officially launches. Recently Jason Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media's entertainment group and Brian Jaquet, Sling's Director of Public Relations came through Boston and caught me up on their plans to launch commercially on Nov. 24th.

    Many of you know that Sling is the maker of the Slingbox, which connects to your TV or DVR, allowing you to remotely watch programs on your computer. It's a very clever product, though I have to admit its use case has always been a little confounding to me. Nonetheless, just over a year ago, Sling was acquired by EchoStar in a $380 million deal. Shortly thereafter, EchoStar split itself into two parts, Dish Network, the satellite-delivered programming company, and EchoStar Corporation, which includes Sling and other technology-based businesses.

    Sling.com, developed by Jason's entertainment group, is the first Sling offering not tethered to any of its devices and therefore open to all users. Acknowledging that Hulu has set a high bar on user experience, Jason explained that Sling.com is attempting to go one step further on usability, and will also differentiate itself with updated social networking capabilities and highly focused editorial content.

    In particular, Sling.com offers a slew of Facebook-like features that allow users to subscribe to and favorite programs and networks, with users in turn able to follow these activities. As Jason aptly put it, the goal is to "digitize the water cooler conversation." The whole experience is geared toward engaging the user at a far deeper level than we're accustomed to in passive linear viewing, or even typical at other aggregators' sites.

    The real differentiator for Sling long-term though is the integration of Sling.com with the remote viewing offered by Slingbox. Enabled by a new web-based player (instead of the prior downloadable client), users are able to seamlessly browse back and forth between watching live TV and cataloged programs, as shown below.

     

    Taking this one step further, Sling's goal is to get its remote viewing technology embedded in others' set-top boxes as well. So for example, a Comcast STB with Sling inside would allow you to have live TV integrated into your Sling.com, without having to go buy another box.

    That's an enticing prospect, but making it happen will be no small feat; the STB giants like Motorola and SA (now part of Cisco) will get on board only when their biggest customers - America's cable operators - ask for it. The prospect of these cable executives wanting to incorporate any technology controlled by Charlie Ergen, Echo's founder/CEO and the cable industry's arch-enemy, stretches my mind. However, stranger deals have been done, so who knows. In the meantime, there are a whole lot of other non-cable homes globally Sling can address first.

    But much of that is down the road anyway. For now, Sling.com is going to compete head on with Hulu (which by my count supplies virtually the entire current movie catalog at Sling.com, in turn begging the question of how many different ways one relatively small ad revenue stream can get carved up?), Fancast, the portal sites, YouTube and so on. Jason readily admits that these sites will not compete on content exclusivity; ultimately they'll all have access to everything that's available.

    So in this incredibly crowded space, is there room for a newcomer? On the surface, it's tempting to say "no." But history teaches us that "better mousetraps" can elbow their way into even the most crowded spaces. Remember how many search engines already existed when Google burst onto the scene? On a totally different level, I can relate to this challenge myself. A year ago I wondered whether there was room for a new broadband video-centric blog when so many others already existed; now here we are.

    The reality is that newcomers succeed because they don't accept the status quo as final. Rather, they find smart ways of delivering new and better value to customers who didn't necessarily even know what they wanted, but when they got it, were delighted. That's Sling.com's challenge. Whether it can meet it remains to be seen. But in this crummy economy, their deep-pocketed backing certainly gives them a leg up on any VC-funded competitors when it comes to long-term staying power.

    What do you think? Post a comment now!

     
  • Broadband Video Drives Cisco's Zettabyte Forecast

    Yesterday, in "Video Usage is Creating a Hairball for Broadband ISPs, Others," I scratched the surface of how ISPs' networks are becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of broadband video being consumed each day along with potential solutions currently under experiment.

    Today, to help put the problem in some context I'm pleased to offer a dozen slides excerpted from Cisco's recently released Visual Networking Forecast, which shows strong growth ahead for video, as it becomes the predominant type of Internet traffic. To learn more about the forecast and its implications, I recently spoke to Cisco's primary forecasting analyst, Arielle Sumits.

    Click here to download the slides.

    Arielle explained that Cisco started doing the forecast years ago as an internal project to help inform its own business decisions. As it recognized there was a dearth of this information available publicly, it decided to release the numbers.

    Cisco bases its calculations on analyst projections for Internet users, broadband connections, video subscribers, mobile connections and Internet application adoption. As a significant equipment vendor to service providers, it is also able to collect data from these customers to validate its forecast. In fact, Arielle said that in Q4 '08, Cisco will begin supplementing the forecast with actual data from 12-15 service providers, breaking down their users' consumption by video type (professional, UGC, etc.)

    The forecast shows that broadband video's growth will continue apace. Cisco is forecasting half a "zettabyte" (definitions are provided) of data will cross the global Internet by 2012, with broadband video accounting for nearly 50% of the total. Accounting for video's rapid expansion, global consumer Internet traffic will quadruple by 2012.

    Putting this in perspective, Cisco estimates that in 2012 global broadband video traffic will be 380 times what U.S. Internet backbone traffic was in 2000. Even in 2008, video is already impressive, with Cisco estimating that the video viewed at just 7 sites (YouTube, MySpace, Xbox Live, iTunes, NBC, ABC and Yahoo) is already greater than what U.S. Internet backbone was in 2000. (If you want to read the whole white paper Cisco wrote about the forecast, it is available here.)

    While all of this is good news for those pursuing broadband video business opportunities, the forecast again underscores the significant issues facing broadband ISPs, on whom we all rely to actually deliver video across the so-called last mile. Broadband video's growth is dependent on these companies figuring out how to economically keep up with the explosion in video consumption. As I tried to point out yesterday, there are, as yet, no perfect answers to be found.

    Click here to download the slides.

    What do you think? Post a comment.

     
  • Video Usage is Creating a Hairball for Broadband ISPs, Others

    The explosion in broadband video consumption is creating a significant and growing hairball for broadband Internet Service Providers, content providers, regulators and others. The core problem is that ISPs' networks are getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of video being consumed each day.

    ISPs have several ways to address the situation, but unfortunately none are perfect. For example, Comcast's approach until recently has been to use network management tools to block or slow certain kinds of traffic, such as peer-to-peer. P2P is a particular issue for cable ISPs because it uses scarce "upstream" bandwidth. Network management is highly technical, making it hard for policy-makers to understand it, let alone legislate it. So Comcast is now facing a sanction from the FCC over its network management practices (which it says it's moving away from anyway), because the FCC didn't consider them "reasonable" by its own vague definition.

    Time Warner Cable is experimenting with another approach: tiers of service carrying bandwidth caps for users. This is a little bit like today's cell phone model - you buy a package of minutes, and if you go over, you pay extra. Though that may sound reasonable, it invites all kinds of confusion for consumers (e.g. "do I watch that show on CBS.com? Maybe I'd better not, I think my kids have watched a lot of YouTube clips this week and I don't want to go over my cap."). Content providers are justifiably concerned about this potential scenario. Separately, for its part, AT&T recently tried to clarify what its users can and cannot expect from their broadband subscriptions.

    Yet another route is for broadband ISPs to adopt a much more expansive technical approach to how content is hosted in their networks and delivered to their users. Equipment vendors like Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco believe that ISPs could convert the current bandwidth problem into a full-fledged business opportunity. This would involve ISPs deploying hardware and software that would enable "managed services," each to be delivered at a specified quality level and for a specified price. So rather than a consumer buying a tier, they would buy a specific service offering (e.g. unlimited Hulu, with HD delivery guaranteed).

    This wouldn't be a totally unfamiliar concept. Content providers have been buying managed hosting/delivery services for years from CDNs like Akamai, Limelight, Level 3 and others which guarantee certain delivery metrics. But these CDNs' guarantees can't reach into the "last mile" the ISPs' networks serve. So as ever-more bandwidth intensive content is launched such as HD and long-form, content providers should have an increasing motivation to see last mile ISPs offer comparable managed services offerings from ISPs as well.

    However, ISP managed services would require fundamental changes in how these companies currently work together, and also invites concerns from "net neutrality" advocates that ISPs could bias in favor of one content provider or another when making their deals. Though compelling in concept, there are many details to sort out in the managed services approach, making it a longer-term option.

    All of this just scratches the surface of the growing bandwidth hairball. Layer on the free-speech advocates like Free Press and Public Knowledge and the politicians looking to make hay with constituents and it's evident that the debate over bandwidth is only going to intensify.

    What do you think? Post a comment now.

     
  • 5 Observations from My Digital Hollywood Panel

    Yesterday I moderated a spirited panel at Digital Hollywood. Panelists included:
    Rebecca Baldwin -GM, Zap2it, Tribune Media Services
    Jonathan Bokor - VP, Business Development, Tandberg Television
    Dave Brown - Senior Product Marketing Manager, Cisco
    Rich Cusick - SVP, Digital Media, TV Guide
    Bob Leverone - VP, Television, Dow Jones
    Rex Wong - CEO, DAVE Networks

    I had 5 observations from the discussion:

    1. Broadband video is making its mark - From the panelists' intros, it was clear that these companies are all being impacted by broadband. For example, Cisco used to be all about IP, now "video networking" is driving growth, Dow Jones used to be all about print, now it's creating high-quality original video for multimedia experiences, TV Guide used to be about print and cable, now it has significant online video guide. Broadband's impact is poised to grow further.

    2. With video proliferation, navigation is key challenge - panelists agreed that users' ability to find what they're looking for in the sea of broadband video is a huge issue. Both TV Guide and Zap2it are focused mainly on TV/entertainment content for now, question arises, will there be a one-stop guide destination for all broadband video (TV, films, short form, UGC, news, etc.)? Nobody owns that position right now, so who is best-positioned to fill that role?

    3. Broadband video must be more than just TV - Jonathan made the point most strongly, and others agreed. For broadband to succeed it must do more than just be another medium for delivering existing TV programs. Sure, there's a rush to get broadcast TV shows online, but only real innovation will distinguish broadband from me-too TV delivery. Here, here. I've been preaching that for ages. Broadband offers a whole new creative palette to harness.

    4. Cable operators wary of broadband video - no big surprise here, but Dave made it clear that major cable operators are wary of broadband and are focused on retaining as much control of the video experience as possible. For example, I asked what the roadmap looked like for cable operators to enable users to watch YouTube videos (and other broadband-only fare) on their TVs through cable set-top boxes, and if I understood Dave's response correctly, it sounds like no time soon. Quality, liability, and of course control are key limitations. If cable's not going to bring broadband to the TV anytime soon, might that open the door for third-party boxes?

    5. WGA strike could drive more broadband projects - Rich speculated that a byproduct of a potential WGA strike and writers sitting around would be that maybe more broadband projects would be undertaken. Hard to predict, but there's certainly plenty of interest in broadband-only production, so my guess is writers wouldn't have a problem finding opportunities. Wouldn't it be ironic if the potential strike, which has new media compensation at its core, actually spurred more broadband video?

     
  • Black Arrow Shoots for Multiplatform Ad Success

     
    Black Arrow has an ambitious goal of managing and serving ads across broadband video, DVR and VOD platforms. With audience fragmentation causing chaos in the advertising world, such a solution, when fully implemented, would have enormous value to content companies and service providers (cable, satellite, telco).

    Black Arrow has been around for a while but went under the radar for the past few months. Now it's re-emerging, with new CEO Dean Denhart installed about 6 months ago.

    Dean briefed me last week on news the company announced today, which included closing a $12M B round from existing investors Comcast, Cisco, Intel, Mayfield and Polaris and officially launching their ad platform.

    The company is trying to differentiate itself from many others serving ads in the broadband video space by tackling the thorny problem of also inserting in both the DVR and VOD environments. DVR insertion today is non-existent and for VOD it's not scalable. To succeed, the company will need to integrate its servers with the service providers, which is no easy feat. As many of you know, the rap on cable operators - and I've experienced this first-hand - is that selling into them wears out early-stage companies, using up precious time and capital in long drawn-out testing, selling and negotiation cycles.

    If Black Arrow survives this process and proliferates its gear into headends, it will have a formidable competitive advantage against competitors. And on the encouraging side, in the cable world at least, a nascent set of standards dubbed "DVS 629" governing digital ad insertion is now being worked on. Black Arrow is following these closely. Dean explained that the company has proven in its technology and in 2008 it will be pursuing field trials and initial rollouts with major operators. Certainly having Comcast as a lead investor can't hurt its chances.

    Black Arrow's real appeal to content companies will only begin when it has significant deployments. Dean explained that while the cable sell-in process continues to unfold, it will follow a parallel track of managing ads for broadband, with the longer-term value prop of multi-platform support. And it's taking a wait-and-see approach on which business model to use to fund the capex for proliferating its servers. An analogous and interesting approach is the one Akamai has mastered - i.e. not charging ISPs. Instead it positions its gear contributing to top-line growth and opex reductions. This strategy has been a massive success for Akamai, helping it achieve widespread deployments and a huge entry barrier for competitors.

    I really like this company's vision; however achieving it in full is going to take tenacity, patient and deep-pocketed investors and a few good breaks.

     
  • Review of Akamai Analyst Day

    As mentioned in my earlier post, today I was at Akamai (disclaimer: Akamai is a VideoNuze sponsor) for their annual Analyst Day. I only stayed for the morning sessions, but, reflecting how important the Media and Entertainment (M&E) vertical has become for Akamai, they put a huge emphasis on M&E updates, so I think I was exposed to all their news. Following is an objective review of my takeaways:

    As the largest CDN and established incumbent in broadband video delivery, Akamai's capabilities and plans are crucial to broadband video's continued growth. To be sure, the company's market dominance has been challenged by newer rivals (which continue to emerge seemingly daily) and talk of alternative approaches such as P2P continues to swirl.

    As with its underlying web content delivery model, Akamai stakes its differentiation - and premium pricing - on the company's highly distributed content delivery architecture. The company now has 27,000 servers in 1,600 locations within 900 networks. As Tom Leighton,Chief Scientist and co-founder pointed out repeatedly in his presentation, this model contrasts with its competitors' model of co-locating their servers exclusively in big data centers (where Akamai has servers as well).

    Akamai's distributed footprint addresses a key chokepoint in the Internet: the lagging performance the "middle mile", the vast expanse of routers that forms the guts of the Internet between the first mile data centers/Tier 1 interconnects and the last mile cable/DSL/Ethernet connections. By Akamai's calculations, the performance of the "middle mile" has grown by only 6x, while the first mile has improved by 20x and the last mile 50x (think how your cable model blows away those pokey old dialup modems).

    In Tom's view, competitors' performance delivering video and other applications is handicapped because their servers don't fully overcome the middle mile's deficiencies. Akamai's goal is to be serving content from servers within 10 miles of the user. Tom's estimates are that Akamai can serve content 2-6x faster than competitors and with 2-8x more reliability. These figures are magnified when it comes to delivering high quality video files. In a test Akamai did for a major media company trying to serve 4GB video files to Japan, it took Akamai 12.2 minutes to deliver the file, while servers located 500-1,000 miles away took 2.2 hours, 3,000 miles away took 8.16 hours and 6,000 miles away 20.hours. This was of course an Akamai test, but, assuming the data holds up under closer analysis, this would be pretty compelling for media companies looking to optimize user experiences.

    To debunk pundits who have suggested the Internet cannot scale to deliver the explosion of video, particuarly HD, Tom drew a hypothetical case of 50M users each streaming at 2 megabits per second resuting in total bandwidth needs of 100TB of capacity. Akamai's goal is to have just north of that deployed by 2010. Estimating usage is notoriously difficult so who knows whether having 100TB will be sufficient or not, but again by Tom's calculations, none of its competitors will be able to come close.

    A recent challenge to Akamai's architecture approach has been P2P's potential. Akamai acquired Red Swoosh and outlined how it is integrating this technology. For Akamai, standalone P2P delivery isn't realistic, rather it requires both CDN-assist and also cooperation from willing customers and ISPs who could squelch its adoption. It sounds like the Red Swoosh technology is being slowly introduced to select customers and to test its acceptance. Of course Akamai would like to reduce costs for its customers, but the company made clear P2P is no panacea for content owners expecting to dramatically slash their delivery costs.

    Yet another challenge has been the prospect of service providers and telcos building out their own private CDNs using gear from companies like Cisco. In an offline chat with Tom, he mentioned that this approach has been around for years, but hasn't seen significant adoption. So he expects some providers will continue to pursue it, but ultimately, Akamai's overall solution approach will always give it an edge over these homegrown alternatives.

    It's clear that Akamai also sees delivering HD as a key driver of its future success. Customers are expecting ever-higher quality, and this plays into the company's positioning as a non-commoditized provider. So while Akamai acknowledges that price is a key factor in customers' decision-making, it's quite clear that the company is relying on data from its own testing and actual customers' performance to demonstrate why quality and reliability matter, and how these translate into greater revenues and user loyalty. Given the wealth of data they shared today, it is evident that Akamai's sales approach is pretty sophisticated.

    Having developed and seen myriad business cases for small and large video providers, I know first-hand how significant the delivery cost line item is in these P&Ls and how tempting it is to zero in on low price as the key decision criterion. Expect Akamai to keep making the case that while important, it is far from the only variable.

     
  • Akamai Analyst Day Tomorrow

    Tomorrow I'll be at Akamai's annual analyst day (disclaimer: Akamai is a VideoNuze sponsor). The morning speaker line-up includes Paul Sagan, President and CEO, Tom Leighton, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder and Mike Afergan, CTO. I attended last year and found it to be an extremely informative day, especially since Akamai is the leading CDN and has been very focused on the media and entertainment space.

    I'll be listening for information on 3 specific areas:

    • Update on pricing pressure and what this means for customers?
    • How Red Swoosh P2P integration is coming along and are any customers using it yet?
    • Any insight on service providers' (cable operators and telcos) motivation to build out their own private CDNs with gear like Cisco's CDS?

    I'll try to provide an update before hopping a plane to Dallas to speak about broadband video trends at a large broadcasters' executive offsite.

     
  • Joost Names Volpi CEO, Things are About to Get More Interesting

    joost.jpg

    Today Joost announced that Mike Volpi, formerly a long time senior executive of Cisco, would become its new CEO.
     
    The NY Times has a story with a couple of noteworthy quotes from Volpi that give a window into how interesting things are about to become.
     
    "Joost is a piece of software and it can reside on a variety of platforms," he said. "It could be on a television set-top box. Or potentially it could be imbedded in a TV set with an Ethernet connection, or on a mobile phone, or in some alternative device that might come out in the future. The flexibility is really high."
     
    Would that be a cable set-top box or one possibly made by Apple, Linksys or Sony, perhaps? I'd bet on the latter possibilities. Of all the broadband video aggregators, Joost is most clearly positioning itself to be a new competitor to cable and satellite operators.
     
    "Content owners don't care where content is distributed so long as it reaches a larger number of users who can be monetized."
     
    Well, sort of. What content providers care most about these days is doing no additional harm to their already perilous existing revenue streams. If doing a deal to distribute content through Joost is neutral to potentially positive, they'll do it. If it's neutral to potentially negative vis-a--vis current relationships, they won't do it. I believe they'll get all the broadcasters to sign up with them. But the big challenge is whether they can get cable networks to give them their best prime-time programming, available at the same time it's available on cable.
     
    Even if cable networks can do this (and that's an "if" yet to be unraveled by scads of lawyers), it may not be a good business decision to do so. To my knowledge, Joost isn't paying the precious monthly affiliate fees which are the lifeblood of cable networks. Do a deal with Joost for no fees and you run the risk that existing paying customers (i.e. cable and satellite operators) might just want the same deal next time you meet at the negotiating table. Volpi knows cable operators like the back of his hand. Cisco's made billions supplying them networking gear to power their broadband networks for years and more recently digital cable gear from Scientific Atlanta. Now Volpi needs to convince cable operators' programming suppliers to work with him. This will be interesting to watch.
     
  • Back from NAB - Super Session was Standing Room Only

    I'm back in Boston after a short, but grueling (tip: don't fly through 2 East Coast airports during a Nor'easter!) trip out to NAB. Our Super Session ("The Revolutionizing Impact of Broadband Video") was SRO, overflowing the room that seated 700. David Eun led us off with a great keynote with my key takeaways:
    • "Market for content is much larger than anyone has every imagined"
    • "We see ourselves as a conduit, connecting users, advertisers and content providers"
    • "Broadband provides an infinite # of at-bats, the traditonal scarcity is gone"
    • "Content identification isn't easy. If it were, we'd have it by now."
    • "We are in a clip-driven culture. YouTube now delivering well over 100M clips per day."
    After Dave's talk, our panel (George Kliavkoff from NBCU, Dan Scheinman from Cisco, Blake Krikorian from Sling, Shawn Gold from MySpace and Gary Gannaway from WorldNow) got down to business. George, who's the acting head of the JV with NBCU and News Corp, filled in some details for how the venture will work, and that affiliates will be a key part of it going forward.
     
    The panelists all agreed that community is going to be a big part of the equation moving forward and that broadcasters will be embracing in a big way. Gary articulated well that local broadcasters have a huge opportunity to excel in local content in a way that big portals will never be able to match, and that if they sell their inventory the right way, they'll be able to avoid being commoditized.
     
    I tried to get Dan to take the bait on whether the era of broadband-delivered TV programming spells concern for cable TV operators. But given Cisco's ownership of Scientific Atlanta, he deftly deflected my attempt to stir the pot....Lastly, Blake encouraged broadcasters to see his Slingbox as an opportunity for them to build loyalty with their viewers, both for viewership while on the road, and also for deepening viewership, through non-TV displays. All-in-all, despite the fact that the first attendee question during a brief Q&A session labeled us as "dying dinosaurs", it was a spirited and lively session!
     
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