Alan Breznick

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Below is a transcript of the Backstage Conversation with Alan Breznick, Editor of Light Reading

[ 00:00:17 ] There’s a couple of big forces of change. One is the move to I.P which is the broadcasters and seeing just as much as the cable and the other service providers. Everybody is trying to make the transition to all IP delivery of media and some industries are better positioned to do that than others. Broadcasters are starting probably from more from scratch than some of the other folks with cable operators are going through a lot of the same transition trying to figure out the best way to get to all IP delivery because it’s a messy involved process. That’s a good question and probably has to be a mixture of both. You definitely need a new a new group of people coming in who are trained in IPs from the beginning but that won’t do the whole trick because it’s just not enough for those people so you have to retrain some of the folks you have now. But it can be pretty tough to retrain somebody who’s had 20 30 years experience in SDI and teach them a whole new thing.

[ 00:01:22 ] On the cable side though people are excited about some of the new next gen architectures that they’re looking at that will allow cable operators to provide a faster broadband speeds provide more innovative video services compete better with the OT video players or incorporate T.T. video into their video offerings and basically find ways to streamline their operations and do things cheaper and more effectively. So there’s a lot of initiatives going on in the cable and broadband space that sort of mirror what’s going on in the broadcast space basically trying to deliver seeing video and broadband quicker cheaper more efficiently and at higher speeds.

[ 00:02:10 ] Well there’s all sorts of obstacles technical obstacles as training obstacles financial obstacles operational competitive obstacles to everybody. The common element like that like I mentioned earlier is everybody wants to get to IP. So everybody is working. Each industry is working at it at his own pace and in its own way.

[ 00:02:30 ] But they’re all going to get to the same point where they’re all delivering one media over IP technology rather than over over the air technology or in cable space of a quantum technology or things like that. Not too well I mean it’s a huge issue. There’s a lot of data that can flow in and people are trying to figure out how they’re going to manage that how they’re going to make sense of it how they’re going to organize it how they’re going to extract what they need out of it because you can get a lot of data in but if you can do anything with the data it’s not doing you much good.

[ 00:03:06 ] So Another problem is that a lot of data comes in but it goes into different silos and silos don’t mix. So you can’t pull out the data that you need from one place and use it in another place. So there’s all sorts of data analytics things that have happened data management things that have to happen and it’s not an easy issue to sort out.

[ 00:03:32 ] Right. I don’t know enough about the specific tools to say which is going to be the winners and which are going to be the losers. But there’s so much pressure to produce these tools and vendors are working on it so that there will be tools. It’s just a question of how long it’s going to take which you’re going to be the best tools and how much is going to cost because it’s going to cost a lot of money.

[ 00:03:58 ] That’s a good question. They probably go about it by doing. I know when the cable exec case they go about it by very incrementally. So they do a little bit and see whether they can make money on it and do a little bit more and see what they can make as they move cautiously hopefully methodically and work their way there. But it’s a messy transition. You don’t just throw out everything you have now and adopt something new. So the monetization angle means that they’re going to have to go slowly and figure out each step of the way how they can pay for it.

[ 00:04:36 ] You know our audience or is that there’s a broad swath of people who are involved in communications technology and it extends from the enterprise space to the consumer space and takes and video it takes and broadband it takes and telco takes in wireless.

[ 00:04:53 ] So it’s it’s it’s a it’s a lot of engineers but it’s also a lot of strategists and marketers and it’s a pretty big a pretty big order. It’s hard to work with you us because you’re getting both CAS and clarity at the same time. Things that the market is getting bigger and yet there’s a lot of consolidation going on and a lot of cross-pollination pollination going on. So people are getting into each other’s spaces and faces. So it’s it’s hard to make sense of it and the beauty of it for us is that it gives us a lot of interesting things to cover. But it’s going to be it’s going to be a real mess for a few years into the next decade.

[ 00:05:45 ] I guess it’s both the beauty and the and the the difficulty of the St.. The challenge at the same time. But it does keep our readers coming back for more because it’s so much so much to write about so much to cover so much to delve into. It’s almost it’s such an abundance of hot topics and interesting issues to get into. And then it raises also besides the technology issues and the operational issues the financial issues it raises a lot of policy issues that raises regulatory issues all sorts of all sorts of things. So it keeps it interesting.

[ 00:06:23 ] That’s a good question. We do produce more video. We do. We are starting more sister Web sites to light reading we used to just be one Web site covering the basics that’s already covered now we have a family of five or six different Web sites that cover all sorts of areas. We’ve created a tech encyclopedia of terms for each of the industries we do specialize videos. We do custom research we do webinars.

[ 00:06:45 ] We do our own conferences so we our business model keeps changing and in accordance with the way the business is changing. So different than where we were five that the company is almost 20 years old and we’re so different from where we were when we started and was so different from when I joined 11 years ago and so different from when I switched positions within the company four years ago.

[ 00:07:23 ] It’s a good question I don’t know if we haven’t yet.

[ 00:07:26 ] It’s not when we’re let out happening in the future but we’re we’re mostly focused on creating new Web sites and redesigning the old ones right now and making them more mobile making them almost more mobile friendly.

[ 00:07:46 ] I guess one thing I mentioned briefly is that we’re getting much more into the enterprise space because before we’ve been focusing on businesses going after consumers now focusing on what the enterprises are doing because everything is coming together. And as for instance with video technology enterprises using the same kind of video technology that service providers are using so that that’s a first. So in that way that with technologies coming together it allows us to cover more vertical markets and we have before.

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Backstage Conversation Season: 2017