Edgar Villalpando's blog

As an Angeleno and a baseball fan, I’ve always been a one-team man. But even though I’ve bled “Dodger Blue” for as long as I can remember, I’ve always been able to appreciate the on- and off-the-field personalities of some of the most notable figures.

Whenever I watch the “Kitchen Sync” or “OTT Monitor Minutes” reports by Colin Dixon, the well-regarded senior partner from The Diffusion Group, I come away with a nugget or two of insight that makes me think.

Let me just say this: The Super Bowl isn’t just a “big screen” experience; it’s a BIG SCREEN experience. “Biggest Game, Smallest Screen” just doesn’t seem like a grabber for Best Buy ads.

As always, the demos were the talk of the show. How DO I get my wife to let me spring for that quarter-inch thick, 55-inch OLED display? Definitely NOT by buying the robotic window cleaner as an anniversary gift. It seemed like the only thing missing was a Hawaii Chair demo.

Man, you’d think that the Xbox was the first multitasking set-top box ever to infiltrate American homes, based on the excitement over the latest update to Xbox Live. Xbox now offers loads of OTT and some cable content in addition to a top-notch gaming experience, and that’s great… but it’s still just some cable.

At SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, Cox Communications president Pat Esser talked about how cable isn’t leading “the revolution,” its customers are.

Cisco Systems is the big dog on the networking block for a reason: They always seem to know which way the winds are blowing.

Sometimes the forces of history make people and organizations do things that would have seemed unthinkable just months before they did them.

That seems to be what’s happening right across the street from my office, over at Adobe. What can I say? I like watching history happen outside my window… as well as birds flying by, traffic tie-ups on the Guadalupe, cranky people attacking pigeons and, of course, clouds. Lots and lots of clouds. Anyway…

As an unrepentant evangelist for “the cloud,” I’m always excited when someone uses it to provide a better viewing experience for consumers. So I was thrilled to read last week that Time Warner Cable is bringing a cloud-based Electronic Program Guide (an EPG, to those of us in the know) to some of its subscribers.

Some comments by Dan Saunders, Head of Content Services at Samsung Electronics Europe, caught my eye. In this report by videonet, Saunders says that, going forward, the value of a connected TV device will not be based on the OTT content it offers.

You know, sometimes when a company gets huge it’s because it consistently makes the right calls. The largest of all cable companies, Comcast, makes a lot of those, so it’s no shock that they hit a bull’s-eye regarding OTT application development.

I’ve made the case for the cloud in the smart TV/connected TV realm many times before. Among the cloud’s many smart TV virtues are that it expands the range of consumer devices that can offer TV apps and OTT content, and it provides a write-once, run-anywhere development and maintenance environment.

Now the cloud has a game-breaking ally in its bid to gain acceptance in the smart TV world: HTML5.

Simply put, we’re inexorably heading towards a world where TV apps are authored in HTML5 and hosted in the cloud.

We’re now several years into “over-the-top” (OTT) offerings—that is, video that comes to your TV from an Internet connection, not from traditional cable/satellite operators, broadcasters, or via DVD or Blu-ray Disc. Yet consumers, manufacturers, operators, advertisers, Hollywood and Web developers still haven’t found the promised land.

In fact, OTT is at a major crossroads, and darned if anyone can find a working GPS right now to tell us which way we should go.