Western Digital and Sling Media Demo Set-Top Boxes
It's not enough to create an elegant set-top box. Manufacturers also need to think about what content consumers can stream with it.
At the recent Streaming Media West conference in Los Angeles, Amit Patel, business development manager for branded products at Western Digital, showed off his company's latest devices. He also expounding on the content strategy behind them.
"If you're going to go and buy a digital media player today, you expect to have access to Hulu and Netflix, even Facebook in some instances. But what we really want to focus on from a content strategy standpoint is, we don't want to be the entire internet," said Patel.
"We want to make sure when we're looking at our content strategy, that we're really focusing in on quality content across all of the various different categories. So when we're talking about the categories, the categories we're talking about are we want to make sure we get the top five to ten VOD providers that are out there, the top five to ten catch-up TV services, the top five to ten sports services, as well as music. The idea with that is if you're looking at VOD, for example, if we go out and get 100 different VOD channels and do deals with them, at the end of the day 98 percent of the content is really going to be an overlap of one another. Everyone's doing the same licensing deals with all the studios. So it's really about providing a rich array of content available to the consumer, not really focusing on any one particular category.
Scroll down to view the entire presentation. Also, download a PDF of the Slingbox presentation.
Connected Device and Platform Demos: Sling Media, Western Digital
As the number of broadband-enabled devices and platforms invading the living room continues to grow, lots of questions remain about their capabilities. In this session, company executives from Sling Media and Western Digital will demo their newest platforms and devices. Attendees will see these devices and platforms in action, learn which content is available on them, and get their questions answered in a Q&A session.
Speaker: Amit Patel, Business Development Manager, Branded Products, Western Digital
Speaker: Mauricio Perez, Lead, Product Integration, Sling Media
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