Cabsat 2012

We attended Cabsat 2012 in Dubai. It was a great opportunity to see the new trends in the telco industry.

As usual, satellite operators were present, all competing on satellite position and coverage, offering worldwide coverage for broadcasters. This time however, the word on the street for the broadcasters was audience measurements. They have invested a lot in various services (satellite,  fiber, adsl and cable) to be global and they would like to get a better understanding of their audience.

The other trend that we spotted was the diversification of the offerings. Satellite for interactive services (finally with a return channel when using the Ka band) and cross-platform delivery (tablet, smartphone, pc, laptop).

These two trends are great use cases of Big Data technologies. Audience measurements can be done using logs of MPEG streams transmissions. The diversification of services is also a great case for Big Data: we see a large variety of devices, a growing volume of usage data and a need for fast analytics to optimize offerings.