THE NEXT BIG THING AUTOMATING THE ENTIRE SERVICE LIFECYCLE. P12
CONNECTED HOME TAKING ADVANTAGE OF HOME STREAMING AND CONNECTIVITY. P14
SATISFYING DEMAND WIRELESS PASSIVE OPTICAL NETWORKS HOLD GREAT POTENTIAL. P18
THE OFFICIAL SHOW DAILY | THURSDAY 18TH OCTOBER 2012
Games industry “fighting broadband”
THE games industry is the biggest entertainment sector in the world and its principal problem today is the limitations placed on it by broadband networks. That was the message delivered to delegates on Wednesday morning by Ian Livingstone, life president of game developer Eidos and one of the founding fathers of the games industry. “We’re fighting broadband,”
Livingstone said. “You’re holding us back, in many ways.” At the top end of the games
market broadband is the bottle- neck. Each edition of military role- playing game Call of Duty takes longer to download than the previ- ous one, he said, because games are growing in file size much faster than broadband speeds are improving. “We have to worry about broadband when we should be thinking about making better games,” Livingstone said. Latency is as much of an issue as throughput, he added; for networked games it has to be a minimum of a single frame of video. Such is the constraint that the two dominant console manufacturers,
Ian Livingstone, President, Eidos
Sony (Playstation) and Microsoft (Xbox) have decided not to move to a download-only model for the next generations of their products that are now on the horizon. Both con- soles, when they arrive, will still have optical disc readers, Livingstone said, because global broadband speeds are too slow. In an entertaining presentation
that tracked the evolution of the games sector from the original Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game of the 1970s, Livingstone suggested that the sector is often
overlooked by the broadband industry. The market is worth $50bn annually today, he said, which makes it bigger than DVD, cinema box office and music. The market is forecast to grow to $90bn by 2015. In part this is driven by the
popularity of mobile gaming, Liv- ingstone said, pointing out that every delegate in the room had a games-enabled device in their pocket. Some 18 per cent of apps in Apple’s App Store are games, and 13 per cent are games in
Google Play. There are 30 million daily plays of Angry Birds, he said. The games industry has had to
adapt to this model, which sees developers struggling for visibility in application stores, which Liv- ingstone described as “the small- est shop window in the world.” The response has been to use
social media to allow end users to invite their friends and recom- mend content peer to peer. Social networks are also an important gaming platform. In August Face- book announced that 230 million of its users had played games on its site in the previous 30 days. In many ways games have
evolved beyond recognition from Pong, the game that kick-started the computerised gaming sector in 1972—although Pong’s social nature and simplicity of opera- tion has clearly influenced the emergence of products designed for Nintendo’s Wii. The games sector is now evolv-
ing from product to service, Liv- ingstone said, and he called on the assembled broadband community not to “rest on its laurels” in ena- bling that service to flourish.
Recognising pillars of the industry
THE biggest hitters in the broad- band industry gathered at De Duif in the heart of Amsterdam last night to celebrate the highest an- nual achievements of their peers. De Duif itself has stood the test
of time, having been built in 1858, and last night played host to the annual Broadband InfoVision Awards, where members of an industry that has also stood the test of time were honoured in a glittering ceremony. This year’s host was Emmy
nominated Daniel Sieberg, who is well renowned as a tech expert and author now working with Google marketing as a spokesman. In a recent interview with Broadband
World Forum, Sieberg said he encourages people to read the comments of Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet”, who says that rather than being a human right in itself, the internet is rather an “enabler of rights”. The internet and the underly-
ing broadband infrastructure that it sits on, is also an enabler of partnerships, something this industry is built on which makes it only natural that the first category of this year’s awards celebrated the most successful examples forged over the last 12 months. The winner was ZTE and
Swedish operator Wexnet for their work on the ICP Store, delivered
as part of a project to build a new access network that enables customers to choose different content providers/service providers that suit their individual needs, with all services being delivered over a single network. Next up was Best Broadband
INFOVISIONAWARDS
Opex Management, won by French carrier Orange for its Assistance Livebox solution. This was followed by the Broadband Home Award, which recognises an excellent product, service, device or innova- tion in the area of the broadband home which offered significant new prospects for increased revenue,
managing costs, improving quality or increasing customer satisfac- tion. Geneva-based firm Advanced Digital Broadcast (ADB) picked up the award for its Epicentro Software Platform, an advanced software platform which has been de- signed to manage the whole home network, activate services on new devices, and highlight and fix issues before the end-user even realises a problem existed.
STORY TWO CONTINUED ON PAGE 03 »
38 years: The time it took for radio to reach 50 million users. 3 years: The time it took for tablets to hit the same level of penetration
Comcast
There are 688,652 apps in the App Store. 123,918 of them are games
Eidos
11.5 hours of content consumed in a seven-hour period by Americans aged 8 – 18
Alcatel Lucent
234,000,000—the number of devices capable of consum- ing IP video that will be in the Comcast footprint by 2015
Comcast
10 per cent—the amount of the digital universe that will be in the public cloud by 2015
Verizon
50 per cent of future traffic will come from the cloud
Deutsche Telekom
230,000,000—the number of people who played games on the Facebook platform during a 30-day period earlier this year
Eidos
Photograph: Frank Noon
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