Here is my brief reporting and update from Broadband Week, a week-long event that has dedicated two full days to the issues of Digital Televisions.

I am leaving with positive excitement about what I have seen and heard so far.

The event program, developed by digital communication and online marketing expert Maurizio Goetz, brought together the two key players of the revolution-in-the-making called digital television:

a) The large telcos and media producers that richly populate the Italian market (FastWeb, Berlusconi's own Mediaset, SkyTV, etc.) and which are, in their words and stats, among the world leadership in terms of content options offered in a multiplicity of formats and delivery models (satellite, digital terrestrial
TV, pay per view, video on demand and more),

b) The small, individual voices of micro-content producers and distributors as Bruno Pellegrini's BlogTV, my own TheWeblogProject and the highly disruptive commercial offering by Petra Bauersachs and Guido Ciburski with their fascinating Byte Tornado and Cybersky-TV products. (Byte Tornado is, from what I understand, an evolved version of BitTorrent which does away with P2P greatest limitations: you can't download more than you are also uploading. Their Cybersky-TV provides a P2P technology that allows near-real-time re-distribution of any TV channel with great ease and low-costs. Their small company (less than
10 people working in it) is already quoted in the German stock exchange and it has already run into the ire of local courts which have initially banned Cybersky-TV software use.)

From their rather formal presentations large media and telecom players have openly shown, as any competent observer would have expected, extreme prudence in defining the new marketplaces we are moving into and prefer to profile their offerings not as drastically different with the ones traditionally offered by satellite and cable TV providers elsewhere.

But here are some more details of what striked me as most interesting:

Read more...