The Year of Living Dangerously" is a great 1983 film by Australian director Peter Weir about an Aussie journalist (Mel Gibson) covering political turmoil in Indonesia during the reign of Sukarno. He gets caught up in the chaos of an abortive Communist revolution and manages to escape, barely, with his life.
Detailed analysis of the pernicious effects of pay-TV signal theft on economic and social development in Southeast Asia featured strongly throughout a series of government and industry meetings held in December 2009 in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The CASBAA-coordinated meetings were centered on an APEC and ASEAN symposium which covered the protection of broadcast content with officials drawn from 16 governments from around the Asia-Pacific region.
With the introduction of digital TV a new way of video transport and delivery has emerged, using the Internet Protocol (IP). Video over IP is a general term to describe the use of IP in any or all stages of video transport to the subscriber (or end-customer). This has to be distinguished from the term IPTV, which means specifically the delivery of video as an IP stream to the subscriber set-top box or TV set. All digital video today that is broadcast, transported over satellite or distributed in cable systems is using the MPEG transport stream (TS) communications protocol.
My previous column for this publication focused on the oil and gas exploration and production sector, with particular reference to the increasing attention of the energy industry on deepwater and ultra-deepwater hydrocarbon reserves which now appear to be much more abundant than was thought ten years ago.
The World Teleport Association (WTA) has published its annual Inside the Top Operators research report. The eagerly awaited report draws from data submitted to WTA by teleport operating companies around the world for the association’s 2008 Top Operator rankings.
The multi-channel TV industry is more competitive than ever, with a major focus on growing business while navigating the new world of online media and digital content. This was the consensus during the CASBAA Con-vetion held in Hong Kong last November.
The CASBAA Convention 2009, the annual industry meeting organized by the Cable & Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia (CASBAA) in Hong Kong on November 3rd - 6th, drew more than 700 delegates, speakers and media from around the world.
Specialization in one or two services brings benefits to teleport operators, including in-depth knowledge of customer needs, the ability to invest in technology appropriate to those needs, and a high degree of expertise. But specialization also carries the risk of having too many financial eggs in one basket. When asked to identify service from which their companies generated at least 25% of revenues, respondents put enterprise networking at the top of the list, followed by broadcast video, civilian government applications, Internet backbone and VoIP and military government applications.
The next Pacific Telecommunications Conference, PTC ’10, will again focus on a hot topic for many in the telecommunication and IT industries, "cloud computing". While seemingly esoteric to many, especially some in the sometimes insular satellite sector, cloud computing is coming to dominate the thinking of planners and implementers in many telecommunications and IT sectors.
Deployment of broadband satellite technologies is correctly recognized as an imperative to maximization of cutting-edge digital oilfield applications and to considerations of cost-effectiveness – it is a force multiplier, enabling return on investment, as well as facilitating mission critical communications links.
The Middle East market has seen the recent addition of new Fixed Satellite Serivces (FSS) operators who are betting on the potential of Direct-to-Home (DTH) and broadband services via satellite in the region. But is the market really there for these services?
What drives demand for FSS satellite capacity?
