IBC Show 2011 – Preview Day 1

I showed up early at the RAI based on the spurious rumour that there was an 8am free conference session – turns out its only free if you’ve already paid for a conference pass!  It has given me a rare few hours to read up on the latest happenings in the broadcast industry and to plan before the melee begins when the exhibition opens at lunchtime.  So here are my thoughts.

The Connected World area promises to be a go-to place this year and not just because it’s conveniently situated adjacent to the IBC Pub.  Starting Saturday there is a series of free Business Briefings offered with speakers from Ericsson, Cisco, and IBM.  Among the exhibitors, the TiVO booth is worth a visit as they’re sure to be showing off the latest Virgin Media UI.  Will be also interested to see Tribune Media Services, ContentWise recommendation engine, Cisco, and a cloud-based MAM (what, another one?) from ReelWay.

Lots of cross-platform content management, workflow, and media asset management banter in the press as you might expect.  Good to read Stephen Petheram (Marketing Director of payment firm, PayWizard) talking about pushing usage information back from consumption to the content owners in an article in IBE Connected World Supplement.  Reporting back to the rights holders is a major challenge when distributing content across online, mobile, and connected TV platforms.  Interesting to hear that FilmFlex has adopted PayWizard e-wallet for their online movie service (http://www.paywizard.com/index.php/news).

Recommend reading the article written by Simon Frost (head of TV marketing at Ericsson) in the Connected World Supplement where he sets out the challenges of content management (can’t find it online but will try to include a link when I find one).  Will be taking a look at Ericsson’s multi-screen offering during the show – hope to see them recognizing the increasing challenge of managing rights as well as metadata and content preparation.

More to follow…