Liberty Global looking to cloud, says Veeneman

Liberty Global wants to migrate as much of its TV platform as possible to the cloud as this becomes increasingly practical, according to Mourand Veeneman, vice-president, technology at Liberty Global.

Delivering the second keynote presentation on day two of TV Connect, Veeneman said that  cloud-based systems were becoming more practical, and that teething problems such as latency would ultimately disappear.

“We want to bring everything that we can to the cloud,” said Veeneman. “There is talk about latency [and other problems] but that all will go away,” he said. Liberty Global wants to move “everything to the cloud” ultimately, he added.

Veeneman said LG was investing a lot in its own cloud infrastructure. “We still like to control things ourselves,” he said.

More generally, Veeneman told attendees that IP is the key to convergence and multiplatform user engagement. “IP is the only thing that really brings everything together. All devices are now IP. We have mobile phones and tablets and they are all IP-based,” he said.

Veeneman said Liberty Global would look to develop  mobile products this year. He said that WiFi was becoming more important both within the home and outside it as a means to deliver video services to multiple devices.

“WiFi is becoming a very important way of distributing multimedia in the house,” he said.

However, WiFi remains problematic and there will likely be a need for more spectrum in the future to delvier video service wirelessly, he said. While offloading mobile video to WiFi is currently widespread, the rollout of LTE could ultimately provide a better distribution platform, said Veeneman.

Veeneman also said that microprocessors were becoming smaller and the reduction in power required for improved performance would continue. “Less is the new more,” said Veeneman. This meant that set-tops would continue to get smaller, while mprovements in Flash memory meant that liberty Global had achieved a 50% reducion in standard storage rack space and a 78% reduction in power consumption, he said.