Virgin Media: Mutli-screen VoD services "two to three years away"
Despite the increasing number of service providers offering video-on-demand services via cable or broadband, managing director of Virgin Media’s online operations predicts that we’re still two to three years away from ubiquity.
Alex Green, speaking at the Online TV and Video Forum in London, said that his company was working towards creating a “seamless, intuitive experience” spanning TVs, computers and mobile devices, but admitted that “VoD is not yet a fully-fledged family proposition” despite “the consumer… becoming increasingly sophisticated”.
“Our solution is to create a network in the home that delivers entertainment on demand to any screen in the house. This will take two to three years,” said Green.
Virgin Media’s own on-demand service currently offers over 4,600 hours of content and gets around 50 million views per month from around half of the media company’s customers.
It’s interesting timing, given that the BBC, ITV and BT have just announced that they’re collaborating on a standards-based environment for enhancing on-demand video services via broadband. Will Virgin Media take part in the scheme that’ll be open to any interested ISPs? I suppose it depends on whether the company feels like collaborating with a major rival (BT) or wants to pursue its own proprietary technology for its cable customers.
(Via Broadcast Now)
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One thought on “Virgin Media: Mutli-screen VoD services "two to three years away"”
this is the same Alex Green that cant be bothered to pay for the existing firmware/middleware for the current samsung and V+ STBS to finally do video streaming to and from the STBs internal ethernet interface to and from any PC connected to your LAN…
this is the same Alex Green that cant even replace the antiquated Liberate STB GUI http 1.0 subset middleware and related backend server batabase for somethig that can run in the very limited CPU as found in the end of line Mpeg2 only decoder STBs above.
this is the same Alex Green that cant even talk to the end users/customers about finally turning and stop filtering the Multicasting protocol all the way from and to the Virgin media end users CPE desktop cable modems, so they could at least start innovating and retrofitting some multicast video streaming on and from their apps to other VM end users in the internal VM network and the JANET/BBC multicast trials that have been running for years etc…
this is the Alex Green that ,,,,, well you get the picture, VM talk a lot but dont actually give the end users what they want, or need to do their own personal LAN video streaming RIGHT NOW.
we cant even officially buy a perfectly valid and official EU endorsed PCi DVB-C card and descramler that takes a valid payed for VM smart card and connect it to the VM network, as VM dont like you using your EU rights to an open canle network or access to the direct transport streams to be played as you want on your personal LAN with VLC for instance…..
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