With my broadband service from Comcast, TV service from DirecTV, telecom services by Verizon, and mobile operating systems from Android, I’m generally not a guest at the bundled services party even if my choices cost me a bit more.
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Connected Intelligence | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | 
April 6, 2012 8:59 am | 
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When MTV played the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” in 1981 it launched a new era of pay television. Cable TV was no longer Community Antenna TV (CATV); now there were—or soon would be—as Bruce Springsteen put it, “57 channels and nothin’ on.”
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Tags: AT&T U-verse, Comcast, DirecTV, MVPD, Pay TV, Verizon FiOS
Connected Intelligence | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | February 22, 2012 4:12 pm | Comments (1)
AT&T is again demonstrating how to use managed IP video delivery—sometimes known as IPTV–to improve the multichannel video programming experience by linking the Web and the TV with the appropriately, albeit boringly, named “U-verse for iPad App.”
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Tags: AT&T, iPad, IPTV, U-verse for iPad
Connected Intelligence | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | February 9, 2012 1:09 pm | Comments (0)
In announcing a new name, new direction, and new marketing strategy that puts more emphasis on services and content and less on low price, Dish did a remarkably good job of obscuring a salient point; the digital divide still exists, and because it does a less-than-enthralling broadband offer looks like it should have legs.
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Tags: broadband, CES, Dish, IP
Connected Intelligence | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | January 11, 2012 1:01 pm | Comments (1)
Verizon’s holiday headline that it will deliver 26 channels of FiOS TV to qualified Microsoft Xbox gamers shows that the big telco—like its cable counterparts—is interested in IPTV but not ready to commit full resources or subscribers to delivering it.
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Connected Intelligence | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | December 6, 2011 11:42 am | Comments (1)
At first glance Dish Network’s toying with the idea of building its own broadband wireless network seems to straddle the line between bravado and fantasy. On closer inspection, it’s a move built on a level of market comprehension that any service provider without a wireless play should be experiencing these days.
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Tags: DISH Network, Wireless
Connected Intelligence, Uncategorized | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | November 18, 2011 3:18 pm | Comments (0)
Despite legions of cord-cutters eager to banish all vestiges of the service provider from their homes, the despised service provider set-top box just won’t, and probably shouldn’t, go away.
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Tags: Cisco, IPTV, Set-top box
Connected Intelligence | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | October 27, 2011 12:23 pm | Comments (0)
Smartphones are an addiction for easily bored people. They tell you sports scores, weather, news, and let you play games — all while you’re waiting that interminable 15 minutes in a restaurant before you get your meal. The thing smartphones can’t do, I’m quickly learning, is download a lot of applications over a 3G network. Read more »
Tags: cable, MVNO, smartphone, Wi-fi, WiMAX
Connected Intelligence, Consumer Technology, Wireless | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | October 4, 2011 8:43 am | Comments (0)
Watching a new cable initiative develop is like watching a hurricane form in the Atlantic Ocean. First you need the pieces that could create this new initiative and then you need to fit them together in a way that would create a new cable business model. Even when all the pieces fit together and forecasters think they have a track, however, the end results are never a sure thing. Just ask those along the East Coast who prepared for Armageddon and lived through a heavy rainstorm named Irene (and others who prepared for the worst, but still had to deal with floods and power outages for days). Read more »
Tags: Android, Clearwire, DISH Network, Google, LightSquared, Motorola, MSOs, Sprint
Connected Intelligence, Entertainment | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | September 13, 2011 9:28 am | Comments (0)
It’s easy and correct to see Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility as a mobile play. After all Android and Moto phones are tongue-and-groove joined. What Google does with Moto phones and Android in the short term—and how the other phone makers and service providers react—is enough to hyper-energize the entire telecom market. Read more »
Tags: Android, Cisco, Comcast, Google, Motorola, Time Warner Cable
Connected Intelligence, Consumer Technology | Jim Barthold, Sr. Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence | August 16, 2011 12:20 pm | Comments (0)
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