MaxFAX…

Cannes Do? Beautifully. Ah, the South of France … Marwan Fawaz, Leslie Ellis, Mike Pohl, Alan Bezoza, Ralph Brown, Brian Coyne, Jeff Baumgartner, Mark Cutten, Mike Lee, Jeffery Brown, Dick Anderson, Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, Jim Ludington, Jim Gillespie, Steve Reynolds, Jeff Siegel, Tom Rogers, Dick Green, Keval Desai, Hemang Mehta and Dave Woodle all suffering from not being in the USA. Well, someone’s gotta do it. Interesting C-COR IPTV Summit… in Cannes last week.

• When will Verizon and/or AT&T learn from Orange? Cable operators can mostly hope: not in their lifetimes. Orange’s package of interoperable services, devices and more are downright impressive.
• Bandwidth management is going dynamic… in a big way. As Charter’s Fawaz noted, some 60-70% of IP traffic today is peer-to-peer… well, just imagine what continued upgrades plus better bandwidth usage will mean.
• Personalization of media isn’t just sending information to the right email address… it will mean complete interoperability among and within ALL conceivable devices that can be connected to, and perhaps integrated with, whatever delivery provider exists. The old content v. conduit isn’t really the issue. The real issue is how to be the billing entity.
• Will US cable ops try to compete out-of-market? Leslie asked Marwan. He demurred… enough on their plate was the answer. But, Cox does have that state-wide franchise… so… who knows? (My take: not likely tomorrow… just the day after).
• Ditto here for the explosive—and imminent—growth of HDTV channels that will have to be carried.
• "The Acceleration of Adoption Arcs"… A couple of years ago, the IPTV Summit was speculative. Last year, the iPod and its ilk dominated… this year, YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace are old hat. What’s the next wild card to enter the mainstream?
• The 4 "Change Agents"… had a panel with TiVo, Sling, Microsoft and Google… all companies that changed the world… and haven’t stopped trying to think of new ways to change the world. Tom’s company started out time-shifting with a "learning" agent… now it wants to integrate and assimilate with all parts of the media spectrum. Google’s genius helping to sort the chaos of the Web led to lead generation replacing advertising models… and more is on the way. Sling keeps expanding on place-shifting of content… and might find a way to generate relevancy remotely. And Microsoft… well, they keep improving with every release (they think; well, as leaders, they make an easy joke target… as Hemang noted: "Don’t buy 3.0 releases").

A thought: If the medium is the message, what’s the infrastructure? This multi-platform, multi-screen world assembled by C-COR that has married service offerings, content and deliverability into a fairly seamless look at today’s developing landscape… more conferences might do the same. (Well, we do that in a cable-centric manner at the CableFAX Leaders Retreat—and off-the-record, at that). Other mid-conference thought: The real gatekeeper is the subscriber. Random Notes

• Jet Lag! Whew. Enough. For a couple of weeks or so… when is CTAM? The Independent Show? Where?
• Who’s Next? Will News Corp absorb Yahoo! Or Liberty? Who will actually buy Crown? When? (Must be soon, some analyst boosted the stock).