Connected Living Rooms, Contentious Networks
The celestial jukebox. Cloud gaming. On-demand movies on your mobile phone. The dream of having all the entertainment you want as soon as you want it, has never been so close. There’s just one catch: network contention. You know it by many forms: A spinning hourglass; a “Buffering” window; a stuttering video. Though full of promise, cloud-based, streaming entertainment is still a long way from the seamless, instant response we’ve come to expect from a DVD player or a console game system.
Why the slow-down? Part of it has to do with delays on the open Internet. But a surprising amount of it has to do with technology embedded in our TVs, home networks and set-top boxes. The explosion in entertainment is stressing our home networking technology to its limits. Every application wants all your bandwidth at the same time. It’s the “tragedy of the commons” right in your living room.
But help is on the way. In this panel, leading experts on home networking and media distribution will reveal the sometimes surprising causes of streaming media hiccups in the home, and technologies that could make buffering delays a thing of the past.
Presenters
Philip Kearney holds the position of director of engineering and product development within the Networking Business Unit at Qualcomm Atheros. Philip has a rich history in the field of networking and communication solutions within the connected home space and continues to be a visionary leader in the field. As part of the Qualcomm Atheros team he manages numerous engineering teams to bring new products and technologies into the market. He collaborates with the business development, engineering and marketing teams and is responsible for the vision and innovation strategies of products. As director, Philip also represents Qualcomm as a sponsor member company on the board of directors of the Wi-Fi Alliance, the trade association for Wi-Fi where all policy, standards coordination and interoperability compliance is driven.
In the past Philip has worked as the director of engineering and product development, communications technologies for Apple, Inc. He has also worked for companies including Agere Systems, Lucent Technologies, and Ascend Communications.
Sebastian is the Reviews Editor and Executive Video Producer for GamesBeat. He has written for numerous international gaming outlets over the past several years, including the award-winning gamesTM Magazine, Play, Bitmob, and Destructoid, as well as authoring The History of Resident Evil and The History of Halo books for Imagine Publishing.
Sunday, March 11
