Looking to the Clouds on the Horizon

I love it when cable operators take bold steps to enhance the subscriber experience. So I felt great when Liberty Global, a huge operator in Europe, announced an ambitious new video platform called Horizon at IBC earlier this month.

It’s great that Liberty has put so much effort into building a platform that brings together so many advanced TV services. But, in the end, we’re still talking about a really expensive set-top box with a complex middleware stack.

As terrific as Liberty Horizon surely is, I’m hoping that it’s the first step toward an über-platform that includes apps running from the cloud. Running it all from the cloud means the customer doesn’t have to download app updates, the operator benefits from reduced support and hardware costs, and it assures a consistent experience across multiple devices and hardware configurations.

A cloud platform that could span nearly ever device available would provide the economy of scale that content providers, advertisers and developers need to profit from the extra cost that interactive programming requires.  Serve it all up directly to my TV, instead of another set-top box, and you’ll really have me grinning. Kudos to Liberty—they’ve moved our industry forward by showing how different services can be integrated into one user interface. Now that they’ve planted the seed, I just hope it gets a little rain from the Cloud to make sure it not only survives, but thrives.