I didn’t get to the TV Connect event in London last year and the last time I attended was in 2015, when it was held in West London. This year, the event had moved to the Excel Centre in London’s dockland area, where more and more shows are moving. It seemed to me that the event was noticeably quieter than last time I went, but it’s always hard to tell when there’s a venue change. There is a conference alongside the exhibition or it may be more accurate to say that there is an exhibition alongside the conference. We didn’t have a chance to attend conference sessions, but went around the exhibition floor. There were only a handful of really interesting booths which many of those companies listed just having closed meeting rooms and just in town to talk to customers.
The TV Connect event is really focused on operators and on OTT and ‘convergence’ and quite a lot of the exhibitors were interested in back end support of broadcasters and service providers or were covering topics such as QoS and CDNs, all interesting, but beyond our remit. We focused on those things that we thought might impact on client devices or customer premises equipment’ (CPE) as it is known – mostly STBs.
One of the topics of discussion at the show was the adoption of Android. We heard from a number of suppliers that operators are keen on Android because of access to the Play Store and because of improvements to Google’s AndroidTV stack. However, we also heard that there is a kind of oscillation between Android and Linux. Sometimes one seems better, at other times the other is more attractive.
Android also has dangers. Kai-Christian Borchers of 3SS said that there is a risk that, in the future, Google may enter the market more aggressively. His company can offer solutions and apps for boxes based on Android, or using apps on iOS, Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV.
