Ready for the video revolution?

There is no certainty right now in the advertising market. Time-shifting via digital video recorders, video-on-demand and Internet-based video is undermining traditional ad revenues. All signs point to more targeted and relevant advertising, but progress on that front is being slowed by concerns about consumer privacy and improper use of viewer information.

Into this cloudy morass, BigBand Networks is trying to project a ray of sunshine. Announcing its MSP2000 media services platform in early September, the digital video transport vendor put forth the argument that targeted or addressable advertising is only part of creating more personalized video services and an inevitable part of the video future.

Furthermore, significant change leading up to this point already has taken place in the market, said John Reister, BigBand's IPTV architect.

“There has been a quiet revolution in the last four years,” Reister said. “Nobody thinks about it as a revolution, but it has happened. On the cable side, with the introduction of switched digital video, we can direct streams around, and with IPTV, there is also the ability to direct streams. That is what enables the type of personalization we think has to happen.”

The problem to date, Reister said, is that all the digital video equipment already in the network was designed before it was possible to do all of this directing of video streams to specific targets and therefore isn't capable of managing that more complex process, scaling it or making sure it operates properly.

That's BigBand's underlying argument for its MPS2000: that it was “conceived and built specifically for the new era of services and for the revolution that has occurred in switching,” Reister said.