Some notes about Broadband World Forum Asia 2008

I chaired the Hot Session at this conference. The topic was “Peer To Peer: opportunity or threat?” The two panelists were rather in favor of P2P although they highlighted some threats. The best quote from Shashi: “P2P means also People To People” I love this one.

Two sessions were interesting from the security point of view. The first one was “VoIP security: Myths and Realities”. The papers were not technically detailed. The most interesting part was the discussions and Q&A. Final conclusion: “Encryption for VoIP is probably useless from the security point of view, nevertheless it makes people feel more comfortable.”
The risk of eavesdropping in a cafe the unsecure wireless transmission is probably not serious. There are easiest ways to listen the speakers such as being near or high quality microphones. The risk of a eavesdropping by government wiretapping is balanced by the legal requirement asking for such feature. In other words, if you want it to be secure, either use an independent scrambling codec, or use a VPN.

The second session was “Monetizing Content: 360 degree view of the customer”. Two speakers were extremely interesting. Daniel Brody VP of Tudou (The Chinese YouTube), and Ringo Chan VP of Tuner International. Some interesting comments/facts. According to Mr CHAN, the release window of VOD will soon coincide with the release window of home rental, i.e., the DVD sales. Currently, VOD occurs one to 3 months after DVD release. The future of VOD will be difficult in China when you find high quality DVD for 1$ at each corner street months before the official DVD release. Tudou succeeded to have a commercial agreements with Chinese content providers. It was far easier than with Western content providers. Chinese content providers do not have complex business models such as windows release. An interesting revelation from Dan. User Generated Content (UGC) is about buzz. And it is extremely easy for UGC sites to create the buzz on the clips they want to promote. He revealed that they are very good at this game.

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