Chief Technology Officer Pace Software and Services
It has been over a year since I was appointed the Chief Technology Officer of the Software and services division within Pace, this has been a very interesting and challenging year.
My main focus has been lowering the cost of delivering digital media, and providing high quality low cost delivery systems for operators world wide. Pace is a leader in providing a low cost high quality digital TV experience. As digital TV viewing is declining in America and Wester Europe, it is exploding in India, Asia, and South America.
Combining all of the Pace software assets; management software, gateway solutions, middleware, conditional access and DRM into a unified integrated and efficient platform has prove challenging and exciting, and we have done a lot in a very short time.
One area of focus has been educating operators world wide about “Secure Software based Conditional Access”. It is very clear from a technology perspective that the age of smart cards is over. Purchasing and deploying a smart card based system today would be like choosing a “Motorola Brick cell phone” over a Nexus. Explaining that why the internet has made this technology obsolete is easy, the hard part is convincing customers on an emotional level that the solution provides the exact same level of security and a much lower cost.
This journey has taken me across the globe and has required a lot of travel, but the effort has been rewarding as more and more customers are seeing the light and have stopped deploying smart card based set-top boxes.
After taking the first step and removing the ties to smart cards the rest is easy, bundling effective, middleware and then bundling the whole package on a quality hardware platform creates a very attractive solution.