Tag: Broadband Policy
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Google’s VP8 Patent Problem (It’s Even Bigger Than You Think)
Last week I encouraged Google to rethink their VP8 open sourcing patent strategy and “do the right open standards thing — join and contribute to responsible standards groups that are working to solve the royalty-free open standards need.” The blog was picked up in Simon Phipps’ ComputerWorld blog, ZDNet, The Register, LWN and elsewhere. At…
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Four Ways to Tell if the FCC’s Open Set Top Interface is On Track
It is gratifying to see the FCC Broadband Plan include an open set top recommendation (4.12), firmly grounded in the FCC’s continuing responsibility to implement section 629 of the 1996 Telco Act to “assure the commercial availability” of TV devices from retail and unaffiliated sources. And welcome words in the frank acknowledgment that over 14…
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Gateway To Nowhere: Standards-Bashing Won’t Fix Set Top Gridlock
Standards “would thwart, not advance, innovation” and “entail crippling delays” because they are “extremely time consuming, often divisive, and sometimes used by one faction to block the progress of another or to promote its own intellectual property portfolio”. It would be easy to dismiss comments like these in the Cable industry’s latest response to the…
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FCC Video Device Innovation Notice: We Need an Open Video Internet!
The FCC Video Device Innovation Notice [1] asks one of the most fundamentally central questions to the prospect of not only a viable Broadband Plan for America, but also to the very future of the Open Internet that has revolutionized communications systems of all humanity: “How could the Commission develop a standard that would achieve…
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Broadcasters Challenge Broadband TV Patent Submarine Threat
I’ve pointed out how the EBU, the world’s largest organization of national broadcasters, is beating the drum to avoid patent lock-ins in new standards for hybrid broadcast-broadband TV services. EBU’s own write-up of last week’s EBU/ETSI workshop is even more direct: “Broadcasters are haunted by the ghosts of the submarine patents which emerged with MHP…
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Patent Dumping For Democracy: Reconsidering America’s DTV Diplomacy
“More Democratic” … “It is a matter of social justice” So US ambassadors have lobbied South American governments since 2007 that “[t]he issue is whether the government will choose the [ATSC] digital television standard that is already providing the highest quality, lowest cost, and most democratic opportunities …” In recent months Peru, Argentina, and now…
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“Conflict Through Consensus”: Europe’s Hybrid Broadbanders Paint on UK’s Project Canvas
A “Julius Stonian” observation: standards groups aren’t “consensus organizations”, they are political organizations. Winners declare their way the “consensus”, and changes in political context shift the “consensus”. So reflects calls in several slides at yesterday’s Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband (HBB) workshop to look deeper into Intellectual Property Rights and other control points in the new “broadcast+broadband” (aka…
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“Trust But Verify”: IPR & BBC’s Project Canvas
I have filed comments in the UK Project Canvas public consultation. To catch up on the UK context with global implications, watch James Murdock’s mesmerizing anti-BBC screed, and say… “This is the BBC.” Perhaps no other single phrase has broadcast more meaning to more people in the great call to communicate that has gripped our…
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6 Things You Should Know About Open Video & Open Standards
It is very exciting to see the “Open Video” movement taking off and finding voice with the upcoming Open Video Conference. This well-earned “open breakthrough” has been a long time coming. After all, open standards, and particularly royalty-free standards, are the very foundation of the Open Internet as we know it, and Internet leaders are…
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Why Did the FCC Broadcast the Broadband Plan Kickoff in a Proprietary Format?
Yesterday’s kickoff of the FCC’s Broadband Plan proceedings were broadcast over the Internet in a proprietary video format. Worse, it was likely converted from a standards-based format to a proprietary format before it was put on the Internet! (The tip-off is that the closed-captioning overlay was already composited in). Clearly, a proprietary broadband internet would…