Briel on: Ziggo ventures into the Cloud

September 6, 2012 10.45 Europe/London By

Ziggo is taking a bold step forward by introducing a cloud based service model for interactivity. The philosophy behind it is that CE manufacturers are putting more and more technology in their home devices. It makes sense to take full advantage of the possibilities this offers.

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Briel on: how smart is YouView?

July 4, 2012 15.00 Europe/London By

A view from the Continent. During the launch of the YouView box, Lord Sugar described the set as a great moment in British television. “It’s not like producing a Sky box, we had to start from scratch, a bit like the first television transmission.” But is it really?

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Briel on: CE manufacturers take a smart lead

June 8, 2012 10.32 Europe/London By

In the past few months we have seen an acceleration of activities from consumer electronics manufactures. By adding ever more services and apps to their smart TVs they seem to be taking the lead in the connected home.

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Briel On: Live streaming goes over-the-top

May 17, 2012 21.04 Europe/London By

There is a thin line between fully managed IPTV services and managed OTT services – and the gap is closing. Soon we will see lots more OTT live streaming.

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Briel on: HBO launches in the Netherlands

February 9, 2012 16.17 Europe/London By

The launch of HBO in the Netherlands in a joint venture with cable operator Ziggo marks an interesting move for the Time-Warner owned company.

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CE manufacturers already on the Horizon…

January 11, 2012 22.23 Europe/London By

We all know we can look at the horizon, but we can never touch it. Does the same also apply to Liberty Global’s Horizon set-top box? We saw the pictures, we even saw the box at IBC – and we saw some flashy Flash demos. But touching it was out of the question – let [...]

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Briel on: iTunes wins Round 1 versus UltraViolet

December 4, 2011 14.37 Europe/London By

Warner Bros.’ release Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 on Blu-ray and UltraViolet has sparked much discontent among its buyers, writes Robert Briel. It looks like Hollywood has trouble finding an iTunes alternative.

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KPN testing its boundaries

August 24, 2011 14.53 Europe/London By

Like all incumbent telephony operators, Dutch KPN is losing fixed line customers to alternative providers, with cable being the most formidable competitor.

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Briel on: Fibre or not to fibre to my home?

June 24, 2011 09.38 Europe/London By

It was a long, long time ago when cable came first to my home. KTA, the Amsterdam city net, was a revelation: the number of channels I could receive tripled – from the two national Dutch public channels to no less than six channels – one from Belgium and three from Germany.

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Briel on: Streaming to tablets can’t be stopped

April 7, 2011 20.13 Europe/London By

Multiscreen television is fast becoming a reality. With the extremely fast take-up of tablets, both iPad and Android, these are destined to become one of the main destinations of streaming videos. A development, which is also bound to create new challenges to the traditional business models.

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