I’m often asked by companies how I pick and choose what news I write about on the blog, which topics I am most interested in covering and how they can get more exposure within my editorial. That’s a great question to ask and while I have detailed this in a blog post before, it’s been a few years, so it’s a good time for me to answer the question again.

For starters, unlike many media folks and analysts who are annoyed by pitches, I’m not. You can contact me at any time via email or phone (917-523-4562) as I reply to every pitch I get. The topic you are pitching may not be a fit for what I cover, or I may not have enough expertise to write about it, but I will always reply. I know many others in the industry feel “annoyed” by all the pitches, or press releases they are sent, but I’m not. Any real analyst understands that is part of the job and they should welcome the pitches.

When it comes to covering news and stories, the sad fact is that I simply don’t have enough time in the day/week to cover all the news I want to. Unlike those whose only job is blogging, my blog is just one of the many full-time jobs I have. I still have to plan shows for StreamingMedia.com, do work as an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, answer all the inbound calls and email from content owners and vendors looking for help, make introductions to others, speak to other members of the media for their stories as work with VCs and those on Wall Street. So much news I see, or stories I want to write about, I simply never have the time to get to. I’m also not interested in doing a “me too” story. If you can read about it on another blog or news site, and I don’t have a different/unique angle to bring to it, simply re-hashing what others have said isn’t valuable. So I’m also always trying to cover topics that aren’t as mainstream, or things others may not have provided any business insight into.

So just because I didn’t cover your news, that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Case in point, I thought the news by Brightcove in April about their new OTT offering was very interesting, especially since they listed the cost for the service, which most never do. I planned to do a blog post about it, and yet two months later, it’s still on my to do list. Another one would be a story I need to do on IBM and just how big of a player they are going to be in this space, and I haven’t gotten to that one yet either. I also need to get posts up about Fastly, Netflix’s spend with AWS, Ooyala, CDN Pricing, NPAW, and highlights from a report on HEVC. There are many more like this, great stories that want to write, but I simply can get to all of them. I only have so many hours in the day/week that I can dedicate to writing. So if I don’t do a story about your news, don’t take it personal.

But what makes it easier for me to get a post online, it to send me some background in an email. I need more than just a press release, that’s a good start, but think of all the questions I am going to ask you about, that the press release does not answer. That’s the info I am looking for. Questions, comments, want to bounce ideas off me for stories, contact me anytime.

[Updated June 15 6:13pm ET: Someone from Verizon’s Executive Relations Team called me 43 minutes after I published the post and has offered to find out the problem and get it solved.]

[Updated June 16 10:52am ET: Someone from Time Warner Cable called me to say they are looking into the problem.]

[Updated June 16 11:51am ET: Thanks to Charter’s CTO for calling me to make sure someone from TWC is following up.]

[Updated June 16 12:06pm ET: TWC has ported the number and it is now working.]

[Updated June 17 10:04am ET: Someone from the NY State Department of Public Service called and offered to step in and help if I needed it. If you have problems yourself, you can reach them at 800-342-3377.]

It’s a sad state of affairs when I have to write a public blog post in the hope that some negative backlash on Verizon and Time Warner Cable will make them fix a problem they should have properly taken care of weeks ago. Verizon turned off the phone to a 93-year-old woman before the number was ported to Time Warner Cable. Four weeks later, Time Warner Cable is saying that Verizon still has not re-activated the number so that Time Warner Cable can make the number work. Verizon says the number is active, but that Time Warner Cable isn’t putting in the order request properly to port the number. So you have a 93-year-old woman who has no phone, and no way for anyone to reach her or check in on her.

Making matters worse, for the past week Time Warner Cable has been telling me they are working to port the number, promising to have it working by Monday at 7pm, than Tuesday by 12pm, only to now say that they can’t port it at all, as the number is not active. So for a whole week, they have been telling me they are porting it, and now have changed their answer. So what have they been working on for a week? On top of Time Warner Cable setting wrong expectations, they also disconnected the temporary number they had set up, so there has been no working number in the house for over a week now. And if the number is active like Verizon says it is, why doesn’t it work? Well apparently, when Verizon says a number is “active” that doesn’t actually mean the number works and you can use it. To actually turn it back on, you have to speak to someone in repair, after it has been made “active”, but after speaking to repair, they couldn’t get the number turned back on either.

Of course I can’t see what is going on between the two companies to know what the actual problem is and both companies have told me they can’t call or speak to the other to resolve it. Verizon told me they have had these porting issues before, but they don’t have any responsibility to make it work since the number is being ported to another company. And Time Warner Cable said they don’t own the number, so they have no responsibility to make it work either, since they haven’t yet taken control of the number. Unfortunately, I am no stranger to porting issues and I know the two main reasons why numbers don’t get ported properly is because the account is not active or there is a block on the account. Verizon says neither is the case. Over the course of 10 hours now, I’ve spoken to more than six people at Verizon and Time Warner Cable, including supervisors, with no resolution in sight.

For all the talk by MSOs of the bells and whistles they are adding to their set top boxes, their mobile apps, or to their TVE services, the number one complaint as a whole by consumers is service and billing. Do any companies take pride in their work or service anymore? How can you leave the office for the day, knowing you haven’t fixed the problem, promising the customer a resolution, only to have the problem drag on week after week. Someone needs to hold companies accountable, this is completely unacceptable service. If the person in this house needed help, and it didn’t come because they had a non-working phone, and no way to call for help, can you imagine the trouble these companies would be in?

I’ll add one more MAJOR problem to the list. In all my calls with Time Warner Cable and Verizon, neither company once asked me to verify any account details other than the name and address on the account. Is that all it takes to be able to make changes to someone’s phone service? And since I was calling from a number other than the one listed on the account, you would think they would make me verify a lot more details. Since I am doing this on behalf of someone else, I have their birthdate, SSN and other info, so I could have verified I was authorized to make changes on the account. And yet at no time, by either company, was I asked to verify more than my name and address, when I wasn’t even calling from the home number. That’s scary. That shows you just how little some companies care about protecting our privacy.

Verizon, Time Warner Cable, fix this! I don’t care what time of day you have to call me (917-523-4562), this needs to be resolved.

The next streaming media industry meetup will take place on Wednesday, June 22nd at Tavern 29 in NYC. Start time 6pm. www.tavern29.com – Network and drink for free. Thanks to PacTV and Kaltura for agreeing to help cover some of the bar tab.

If any other company is interested in sponsoring and picking up some of the bar tab, please let me know. Last time we had a great mix of execs from AOL, NFL, Showtime, NBC, NBA, Time, HBO, Viacom, CBS, Twitter, Google, Nielsen, Facebook, Brightcove, Elemental, Kaltura, NPAW, Ooyala, investors, wall street money managers…..and others.

We will be on the second floor, or on the roof. Just look for anyone with a gold wristband, they are with the group. Or call/text me at 917-523-4562 and I’ll find you. Last time, we were there until about 10pm.

There is no list at the door, you don’t have to RSVP to get in, I just ask for them in advance so I know how many might show up. This is open to everyone, so please share the invite. Pass it on!

Presentations and sessions from the Streaming Media East show and the Content Delivery Summit are now online at www.streamingmedia.com/videos. Please let me know if you see any problems with any of them videos, as I have not yet been able to watch them all.

A lot of people seem to be away at the end of this month, so the next streaming media industry meetup will take place on Wednesday, June 22nd at Tavern 29 in NYC. Start time 6pm. We will be on the second floor, or on the roof. There is no list at the door, you don’t have to RSVP to get in, I just ask for them so I know how many might show up. This is open to everyone, so please share the invite. If any company is interested in sponsoring and picking up some of the bar tab, please let me know.

Guest post by Avni Rambhia, Industry Principal for ICT/Digital Transformation at Frost & Sullivan.

By many measures, HEVC has had a pretty good year. Natively integrated shipment numbers are up – notably in Smart TVs, tablets and mobile phones. The most egregious of royalty terms imposed by HEVC Advance have been rolled back. The HEVC community has made solid strides forward in standardizing HDR specifications for 4K and HD content. The UltraHD Blu-ray specification was locked down, and the first generation of devices and content titles are already shipping. Higher-efficiency implementations of HEVC encoding are available in a growing number of processing cores, including Intel’s new Skylake and from vendors such as Advantech. The end to end ecosystem for 4K is in place, and infrastructure for 4K is slowly but surely being rolled out (think 12G and AIMS). So why isn’t the community more optimistic about the codec?

At the Streaming Media East show last week, there was a lot of talk of HEVC and I presented revised forecasts for HEVC uptake, along with recommendations on choice of codecs and architectures for popular applications, in the context of ongoing trends such as 4K, virtual reality and virtualization. [See: Codec Battle Revisited: HEVC vs. AVC In 2016]

Multiple people at the show commented that they was surprised to see an eager movement to announce the death of the codec. At the surface, it’s easy to see how this may be tempting. The Alliance for Open Media, formed as a counterpoint to the irrational muscle-flexing of HEVC Advance last year, has certainly gained momentum. 4K and HDR are growing rapidly from a percentage growth rate point of view, but content volumes are still small as compared to the entire universe of M&E and enterprise video. VP9 has indeed made strong strides forward in enterprise applications as IT companies eager for speedy progress sought an effective alternative to the stymied and potentially risky HEVC standard at that time. None of this, however, materially impacts forecasts for HEVC adoption.

For most of the history of online video, compression standards for enterprise and M&E applications have been different. Where codecs such as Microsoft’s Windows Media Video, On2’s VP6, and later H.263 powered most of enterprise video needs, MPEG-2 was the powerhouse codec for most broadcast media applications. (In fact, MPEG-2 continues to be the go-to codec for many M&E applications today). The convergence of the two ecosystems around AVC/H.264 brought a welcome surge of growth, uniformity and scalability to the entire ecosystem. This trajectory to convergence was by no means a smooth one, some of us remember the patent fracas of MPEG-4 Part II video, followed by the independent development of H.264, and the eventual unification of technologies from these two competing standards as MPEG-4 Part 10, which we now know as AVC.

The reason for the difference between enterprise and M&E standards lies as much in business considerations as in technological realities. Broadcast workflows are extremely demanding – requiring high-density, high-reliability, real-time encoders. These video streams go through editing systems, graphics overlay and other processes, and pass through a number of products including statistical multiplexers, receivers & decoders, transcoders, servers, set top boxes and playback devices to finally be rendered at the consumer end. It takes months, if not years, for this large community of products from a vast array of vendors to achieve the levels of interoperability, scale, cost and maturity that are required for broad adoption and deployment.

That is why standards bodies work slowly, methodically and collaboratively to develop compression technology that can serve a new generation of video applications with a half life measured in decades. This is in stark contrast to consumer device technologies and even OTT streaming technologies today, where a new platform can emerge, mature and fade all within the space of a year or two.

The economics of video technology in consumer devices sits at the confluence of these two worlds. Entertainment content is coming from ever more diverse sources, from ever more diverse types of businesses, under ever more diverse business models. For CE devices to stand out in a crowded field of their own, they will do what it takes to attract as many content services to their devices, with the best possible quality. Royalty issues have always been a challenge for CE device vendors, as they often are seen to foot the bill on behalf of content services and even studios. As an example, we’ve often seen pushback on DRM security standards by CE device vendors, who are seen to be paying the security taxes in terms of protected hardware paths, trusted execution environments and more in order to protect the IP revenues of content companies against piracy.

At the end of the day, however, the industry finds a palatable medium across technology providers, service providers and CE devices to create an end-to-end ecosystem that drives new CE products, enables better service quality and grows the total pie of video revenues. As a case in point, studies have shown that HD+HDR delights consumers more (and in more use cases) than 4K. The natural question then is whether there is a move underway to retrofit HDR into the AVC standard so it can be deployed more widely. Universally, the perception is that TV vendors are eager to move forward with HEVC and HDR, and there is little to no appetite for working HDR into AVC.

If HEVC were indeed on the verge of oblivion, we’d be seeing a rush to incorporate VP9 into MPEG-DASH and an urgent drive to retrofit hot technologies such as HDR into AVC. We would not see continued increase in investments in accelerating HEVC and building it into silicon. We would see a halt in rollout of new broadcast standards such as ATSC 3.0 and DVB-T2 which are based on HEVC. We’d see HEVC-enabled set top box sales grind to a halt, but instead, we’re seeing numbers rise steadily with a rush of new service releases and rollouts slated for the coming year.

Is there uncertainty? Absolutely. Are royalty issues the single point of failure for a codec? Absolutely not. There is plenty of room to sidestep patent pools to negotiate directly with patent owners. Companies already need to negotiate with Technicolor separately and may choose to do so with other patent holders as well. MPEG-LA continues to be a voice of reason, with licensing terms that are resonant with market needs and the ground realities of how sales are reported and licenses are paid. The rest of the ecosystem will fall in line for M&E applications over time, and a growing number of enterprise applications will transition over as performance improves and costs fall. Real-time, dense compression, standardized delivery and ubiquitous playback are required for content ecosystems to flourish.

By this measure, HEVC continues to climb up the maturity curve. The chasm has been crossed, and an upswing is underway. AVC remains the competitive alternative for most video applications today, but HEVC’s time is here, bolstered by killer applications such as 4K and HDR in the short-term and assured by superior video compression in the longer term.

Thanks to everyone who attended last week’s Streaming Media East and Content Delivery Summit shows. We had a great crowd, more attendees than last year, and a lot of really great content was presented. I still have a few presentations to upload, but many are now online and ready to download. The CDN Summit ones are here, and Streaming Media East are here: Day 1 – Day 2. We are working to get all the videos online, which takes 2-3 weeks and I’ll post a link to them when they are ready.