![]() #Cloudtv 2015 license#Interestingly Gary Lauder the leader of that investment vehicle was the very same man who told us that Cisco had bought a license to the ActiveVideo technology. Comcast may have said “We won’t use your technology until you are in the hands of someone we consider safe” and that was enough of a block on progressing sales that the main investor, Lauder Partners decided to take what it could. In fact Comcast was a bit of a sticking point at ActiveVideo – and it may even be the silent hand behind this deal. Charter is today producing an experience like Comcast’s Xfinity but without a new X1 set top box, something that has likely cost Comcast hundreds of millions of dollars, so it’s easy to see why Charter wants to have a say in how the company develops. The beauty of all this is that old hardware can give newer experiences and at least one generation (or every other generation) of CPE can be bypassed. The same thing can apply to advertising and to running apps in the cloud and sending just the video of the screens to a local machine. Interestingly both of the big adherents to this are now at Sony – which bought Gaikai initially, and recently bought OnLive, which appeared to invent cloud gaming, from the man who bought it out of bankruptcy. #Cloudtv 2015 plus#We saw the same thing happen in video games – where the game action actually occurs in the cloud and all that travels backwards and forwards is video of the outcome, plus movement vectors from the controller. If you think about it, this is where the world of cloud is taking us. There are other pieces of technology here that are contingent upon this, like how do you take a remote control click on a segment of the screen and make it responsive?īut essentially it offers a powerful technology where any device which is already capable of rendering video, can have that video constructed with a new UI in the cloud and have it sent to it as video that it already knows what to do with. It doesn’t sound so difficult, in that a video frame is identified by each pixel and these pixels can simply be rapidly overwritten for segments that need to have UI information on them. This is how it renders a User Interface in the cloud. The key ingredient of what ActiveVideo does is called MPEG Stitching – taking apart a video stream and identifying where graphics or words or any kind of overlay that is used for the User Interface is, and layering it into the video stream itself. ![]() We have noticed that in subsequent deals where Cisco appears to use the technology, these have been characterized to Faultline as “working together” and it looks like perhaps Cisco did not have a license to the patents or at least had not paid the kind of money you would expect for them. ![]() It looks like investors have grown impatient with an asset that has been on its books for too long. The company claims to have licensed its technology to Cisco, which should have paid a pretty penny for it, and it had deals with some of the largest cable operators in the world, including Liberty Global, Cablevision and Charter in the US, and unless all the money, including the patent settlement was taken out of the company by investors, it should have had no financial reason to be sold. ![]() Comcast and others already have their fingers into conditional access, recommendations, advertising, content management, set top middleware and the new CCAP IP architecture.īut there is something we do not like about this announcement. This becomes an Arris asset pure and simple and it will own 65% of the joint venture company and this is more about cable collectively (Comcast already owns a chunk of Arris and a seat on the board) buying the technology that it needs to run itself. We already know that its patents are worth a whole lot more than that, after a single US operator, Verizon was forced by a court in 2012 to pay out $260 million to license its patents. #Cloudtv 2015 tv#Cable equipment supremo Arris and US cable company Charter said this week that they have jointly acquired cloud TV specialist ActiveVideo for $135 million. ![]()
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