Billions of TV Channels Are Coming to You

According to the Hollywood Reporter, entertainment executives agreed that it is the independent producers and creators with emerging technologies at their disposal who now have distribution advantages over the traditional studios and networks.

That was the underlying sentiment behind this year's Independent Film & Television Alliance production conference held at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The confab addressed topics ranging from advertising, mobile and video-on-demand to the blurring of the technological platforms in a new-media world.

"Our investment now is the highest it's every been -- it's now totally about how much can we produce," keynote speaker and chairman and CEO of Entertainment Studios Byron Allen said. "If it ends up being a billion channels, there will be a billion channels."

If we end up with a billion channels of content, then I vote for a re-design of the pitiful cable TV electronic program guide (EPG). There's no way that I can imagine 'paging down' through that volume of linear or VOD programming descriptions. Moreover, we clearly don't need another solution that's focused on 'searching' for content; what we need is one that's focused on 'finding' content. It's really not the same thing -- think about it.

Worldwide Contactless Payments will Exceed $1 Trillion

There's a huge upside opportunity for digital payment innovation in America. As of December 2017, Juniper Research estimates that only 9 percent of the total payment cards in circulation within the U.S. market was contactless-enabled -- this translates into just over 100 million cards. While this is a significant installed base -- around 13 percent of total chip cards issued in the U.S. market -- Juniper estimates that only 5.5 percent of the cards were actually used to make contactless offline point-of-sale purchases in 2017. This translates into about 6 million contactless cards used for payments. That's relatively low in comparison with more advanced markets such as Canada (60 million) and the UK (108 million). Contactless Payment Market Development Juniper Research forecasts that driven by payment cards and mobile wallets, in-store contactless payments will reach $2 trillion by 2020 -- that represents 15 percent of the total point of sale transactions. Furthermore

Digital Identity Verification Market to Reach $16.7B

As more enterprise organizations embrace the ongoing transition to digital business transformation, CIOs and CTOs are adopting new technologies that enable the secure identification of individuals within their key stakeholder communities. A "digital identity" is a unique representation of a person. It enables individuals to prove their physical identity during transactions. Moreover, a digital identity is a set of validated digital attributes and credentials for online interactions -- similar to a person's identity within the physical world. Individuals can use a 'digital ID' to be verified through an authorized digital channel. Usually issued or regulated by a national ID scheme, a digital identity serves to identify a unique person online or offline. Digital Identity Systems Market Development Complementary to more traditional forms of identification, digital identity verification systems can enhance the authenticity, security, confidentiality, and efficiency of

Software-Defined Infrastructure: The Platform of Choice

As more organizations adapt to a hybrid working model for their distributed workforce, enterprise CIOs and CTOs are tasked with delivering new productivity-enabling applications, while also seeking ways to effectively reduce IT cost, complexity, and risk. Traditional IT hardware infrastructure is evolving to more software-based solutions. The worldwide software-defined infrastructure (SDI) combined software market reached $12.17 billion during 2020 -- that's an increase of 5 percent over 2019, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). The market grew faster than other core IT technologies. The three technology pillars within the SDI market are: software-defined compute (53 percent of market value), software-defined storage controller (36 percent), and software-defined networking (11 percent). "Software-defined infrastructure solutions have long been popular for companies looking to eliminate cost, complexity, and risk within their data cente

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