I‘m just coming back from the Broadband World Forum Americas 2007 Conference in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The conference itself was so-and-so - attendance was mediocre, and I don’t speak Portuguese, what made some discussions a little bit complicated.

I was chairman of a Workshop about IPTV markets, trends, best practices, and because a panelist from Accenture didn’t make his plane (so much for Accenture’s acclaimed supply chain and management capabilities), I also ended up speaking. I had 22 people in my audience, mostly vendors, only two operators: Telus (Canada) and Brazil Telecom (Brazil). Two people were English native speakers…

The attendance of the Panel about Deploying and Managing Large-Scale Wireless Video with End-to-End QoS was even lower, we were approximately 10 people. However, The panel around Jay Pabley, Director, Voice and Data Services Development at Sprint Nextel, was of outstanding quality for a couple of reasons:

• All four panel speakers (Kay Johansson from MobiTV unfortunately couldn’t make it) had several calls and meetings beforehand - which showed on the consistent thread throughout all presentations, and and outstandingly concise and densely packed information.
• All panelists cut the marketing bullshit. I was really pissed off about key note speeches of Telefonica (two of them!) that basically went through their website and quarterly reports, and most of the panels I looked into were sales presentations.
• All panelists shared a vision, not just a dream or a target market. Fay Arjomandi, CTO of mobidia, was quite sharp and smart, aggressive, and is destined to revolutionize Mobile TV.
• All panelists were hands-on experts on their topic, not sales people or simple account manager. Kevin Shatzkamer, who is the Chief-Architect at Cisco and responsible for Sprint-Nextel operations, flooded us with his fast talk about network resilience, protecting QoE, Service-Level Agreements, and network resource optimization for mobile video - IP network protection beyond normal “link failure” scenarios.
• Sjuit Dey’s, Founder and CTO of Ortiva Wireless, presented a very technical view and solution to bitrate starvation and RF-induced packet loss for video delivery over WiMAX. His approach and methodology seems to be a turnkey solution to something I engineered 2003/04 for Deutsche Telekom for their Video-on-Demand portal - an automated feed-forward and feed-back approach for video quality control beyond network adaptation.

Inspired by this session, I think I will revisit the Detecon Whitepaper about Playout Intelligence in media and application deployment - my original approach glass-to-glass / end-to-end, from generation to consumption… Let’s see…