March Madness is upon us and the advances in technology have made it easier than ever to stay up to date on the NCAA Tournament action.   I am old enough to remember when the tournament was shown on only one channel at a time and even old enough to remember when they didn’t televise the whole thing.  But that is story for a different time and place.

I was excited this year when I learned that CBS was going to make it really easy to watch any game, anywhere, using almost any device.  This aligned perfectly with a paper I am presenting at the upcoming Cable Show in Chicago this June and now I could claim I was doing “research” while watching the games via broadband.   In my opinion, the first week of the tournament is the most fun, when multiple games air on the same time and while one is constantly trying to figure out which upset to tune into.

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We’ve all heard anecdotal and media reports of mobile subscribers getting a nasty surprise when they open their monthly bill.  CNN ran such a story in the wake of last year’s devastating natural disasters in Haiti:

Kerfye Pierre had recently returned from volunteering in the aftermath of January’s Haiti earthquake when she got the most outrageous mobile phone bill of her life.  The tab? Nearly $35,000.  “I was like, ‘That cannot be possible,’ ” the 27-year-old Washington woman said of the moment she saw that staggering monthly statement.

In another recent story, a woman visiting Egypt got a bill for $37,000 upon her return.  In this case, the provider (Telus) did provide notification of the spike in data use, but the subscriber overrode the cut off and used 1.6GB of data, resulting in the eventual bill shock.

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This week in Atlanta, the leaders of the Cable industry have come together to meet at the CableLabs Winter Conference.  This conference brings together a long list of global companies who play in the cable space, including Internet and traditional offerings. 

One special segment of the agenda was the Innovation Showcase, which features a range of companies, each presenting a 10 minute demonstration on-stage for all the attendees.  This year, Sandvine was fortunate enough to have been chosen as an Innovation Showcase presenter. 

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This year’s Cable Congress in Luzerne was attended by over 300+ attendees, from cable operators, various equipment providers, the analyst community and TV/video content providers.  The main discussions during the conference were focused on content delivery and it became evident that content is key to the consumer now, not speed.

Overall, cable continues to experience healthy growth in Europe. This year, digital TV revenues surpassed those of analog TV.  Most expect that 25% of cable modems in Europe will be DOCSIS 3.0 compliant by 2014. In addition, cable (DOCSIS 3.0) will represent a third of “next generation fixed broadband” by 2014.

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