Channel Surfing on Cloud 9
With the multitude of IP-based media devices around us, the reliance on television for entertainment and content delivery is decreasing on a daily basis. While it is still appealing to watch sports and live events on television, the lure of staying always connected on social network channels cannot be understated. Status updates from our circle of friends and non-stop internet streaming data has taken precedence above all. It’s about time the television industry recognizes this and heads toward a major shift in the content integration paradigm. The amalgamation of content delivery from the social networks, the gaming world, and the channel feed is at an interesting threshold.
Lately there has been much speculation around the television industry’s strategy with the devices (set-top boxes), infrastructure changes, and its service offerings. On the device side, some of the industry leaders in this space are thinking of replacing the traditional set-top box with all IP-based STBs. Service migration to the cloud and creation of an intelligent content delivery network is part of service provider’s video-aware infrastructure strategy. The changes in the service pricing, expensive ‘consume all’ models, may see a different approach to fit a more personalized on-demand channel offering. High quality streaming services and the ability to easily swap content between various media devices will see a major boost.
The name of the game is the advertising revenue. Precariously poised between the Scylla of growing online media subscriptions and the Charybdis of their shrinking channel surfing habits, will the future modus operandi of the television industry embrace the new cloud revolution?
Mahua Mukherjee is a marketing & business strategist at Mushroom Networks, Inc. and a contributor to the Mushroom Networks Blog.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.