A Pixel-And-Ink-Stained miniupdate - Infocomm 2014

Some super-quick pixel-and-ink stained impressions from Day 1 of my Infocomm experience. Expect a longer update when I return to New York and have the time to digest the events of the show and figure out what the overall story is. For now, quick impressions:
Pat Brown remains smart. I had the pleasure of a two hour seminar with Pat Brown of SynAudCon on amplifier specifications, including the math that goes into sizing an amplifier, why better quality audio sounds quieter, and an introduction to the new Common Amplifier Format. Fun activity: ask various vendors if they have CAF data for their amps. You'll either get a "no", a blank stare, or a no followed by a blank stare.
Vidyo remains interesting. In an increasingly crowded  unified communications field, long-time player Vidyo remains relevant in their attempt to include - and showcase - as wide an array of platforms as possible. In their booth they have demonstrations with their own hardware, smartphones, a competitor's Codec (Lifesize) and a PC running Lync. They even had three employees call in from remote locations spending the entire day staring into a videoconference camera to give that multi-call experience.

AVB Remains Promising - but Frustrating
The AVNU alliance had the usual demonstrations of mostly audio products with a little video. It's still very nearly where it has been; a very promising technology needing more applications before it takes off.

Interesting moves from Biamp
Biamp finally released an AEC-enabled version of its Tesira extenders. This allows a much more reasonable build for a  centralized system, They also have a partnership with Lab Gruppen in which one of Lab Gruppen's new amplifiers now comes with what seems to be a mini-Tesira processor built in. This to me says that Lake Processing (member of the TC group along with Lab Gruppen) is not interested in moving to the vtc/install market.

Microsoft Really Is just Looking
Did you see the Microsoft booth? Lots of white space. It might be the biggest booth in the show AND have the smallest amount of product.

That really is the Microsoft booth

Women in AV Continue to be Relevant
Too many booths on the show floor are using women as decoration. Given that and the male-dominance, it's wonderful to see the Women in AV continue to work towards broader acceptance and access in the industry. The second annual mentoring award was given to Theresa Hahn of Verrex; it is well deserved ant the work she does on behalf of the industry continues to be relevant. Let's all work toward a time when this is no longer needed.
More to come! Watch me here, on Twitter ( @LeonardCSuskin ) or on the show floor for more.

End of day AV Selfie with the Drunk Unkles!

Infocomm 2014 - For What I'll be Looking (A Pixel-and-Ink Stained Look Ahead)

Infocomm time is almost here! I'll resume my tradition from last year and  share with you my thoughts on things for which to look on the show floor. Those of you following the discussion online should be aware that my esteemed colleague, AV wunderkind Alex Mayo has already weighed in on this from the cubicle next-door. He has much of it right, and perhaps missed an item or two which I'd have found interesting.

Things for which I'm not looking:

I'll start off taking a step backwards at what I'll not be looking for. If you're looking for me on the show floor, this is where to not find me (and if you're avoiding me, this is where to go):

HDBaseT. Yes, I still use HDBaseT in many, many designs and don't see it going away. It's just reached the point at which it is somewhat commodified and not all that interesting. Without thinking too hard, I'm sure most readers of this blog can think of a half dozen or more companies  with the same product line: modular matrix switcher, all-in-one presentation switcher, 2-gang wallplate transmitter, standalone transmitter, scaling receiver, etc. Nice technology, but the differences have become fine enough that there isn't all that much more to learn. It certainly isn't the future.

Big Manufacturers. I don't like to do "booth tours" with the big players in the industry: the Crestrons and AMXs and such. It's one reason that Extron's disappearance from Infocommland doesn't affect me all that much; I know what Crestron and AMX are up to. I know what QSC and most of the Harman family are up to. Between training classes, social events and the like I'll probably only have about 6 hours or so on the trade floor; I don't want to chew those up visiting things that I'll read a press release about the next day anyway.

So for What Will I Look?
That's the big question: what is the story this Infocomm? Last year part of what caught my attention was the UC pavillion with various hardware, software, and virtualized MCUs and bridging services. Last year also showed us the first Lync room systems, which represented a push for Microsoft to leverage their success in desktop conferencing  to larger spaces. What will we see this year? A few things.

AVB. "The breakout year for AVB" has been predicted every year for at least three years now. In the meantime, Dante has overtaken it as the defacto standard of audio transport over networks (and yes, I know that Dante isn't an open standard. Neither was Cobranet, but that had a very central place for a long time). That said, I've heard some rumblings about finally sending video over AVB, including rumors of some video products in varying stages of development. If we're to move towards a more "converged" world there will need to be some way to synchronize audio and video streams from different network devices. It is my hope that AVB's time synchronization protocol (IEEE 802.1AS) will achieve this. If so, AVB suddenly becomes very interesting. There's been at least one manufacturer teasing a video product, which may or may not see the show floor.

Dante: With AVB dragging its heels, Dante has emerged as the dominant technology for audio transport over networks. Audinate has announced that their 150th partner product will be unveiled at Infocomm AND that they have a new and "disruptive" (their word) software update. Is this a grab for attention, or is there something exciting there? Audinate's track record is such that I'll at least check.

4K, Uncompressed: Like it or not, have skepticism or not, 4K is coming. With the Valens HDBaseT chipset lacking the bandwidth to deliver 4K (or UHD) content at 60 frames per second with a 12-bit color depth the field is wide open. A few manufacturers have teased solutions and strategies, some of which may see the show floor. 

4K, Compressed: 4K content requires quite a bit of bandwidth, and that means some form of compression. Haivision unveiled an HEVC  (aka H.265) encoder at NAB; one other manufacturer has hinted that they might be looking at the open-source VP9 as an alternative. Which of these takes the biggest market share is an interesting 

Something Different
This falls under the "I'll know it when I see it" category. There's a temptation to take the new and treat it as an extension of the familiar. To think of an IP-based AV transcoder, for example, as an endpoint for a virtualized "matrix switch". To think of Dante and AVB as audio transport busses rather than routable protocols adding some freedom. As I said in the HDBaseT category, there are quite a few manufacturers - on the audio and video side - offering near-identical product lines. For an example of thinking differently, I'll look at one product not appearing at Infocomm: Extron's five-mic input Dante expansion box. This isn't a break-in box so much as a complete DSP with no analog outputs. Rather than send audio from a break-in box to a centrally located DSP for processing, Extron chose to apply filters, EQ, and even AEC locally in a little half-rack sized mini-processor box, then send the processed audio (plus dry) via Dante.  It's a fundamentally different approach and, along with Virtual Soundcard, can lead to some interesting design alternatives.

That's where my eyes will be on my whirlwind through the show floor. As I said, I'll also be taking some classes (more on those when I get back), and meeting some AV friends. Socially, you can expect to see me at the AVTweeps Tweetup and, of course, to see the Drunk Unkles at the Hardrock. Fun fact: With my current position at Shen, Milsom and Wilke I've now worked with two of the "Unkles" - Steve Emspak now, and Felix Robinson back in my AVI-SPL days. 

I'll close with some random snapshots from last Infocomm, in no particular order and for no particular reason. I look forward to seeing some of you, my readers, there. If you spot me, feel free to say hello!

In Praise of Analog - a Visit with the Beyerdynamic Revoluto

Digital is fun. Digital is sexy. Digital is what gives us the tools to manipulate sound and video in ways which would have been impossible not too long ago. Today video switchers are digital. Audio mixing consoles are digital. Fancy speaker arrays and even mic arrays are digital. The world is so digital that it becomes easy to forget that the world is, at its core, analog and that, especially in the case of audio, the analog can be the most important. With this in mind, 

(aside - I am aware that the world might, in fact, not be analog. The hypothesis of quantization holds that increases in any entity - be it matter or energy - is by a multiple of discrete smallest increases, or quanta. This means that the universe is, as we measure things, digital - albeit with a very high sample rate and quite a few bits of precision. Some have taken this a step farther and hypothesized that all which we see is a digital simulation running on some form of computer in a parent universe. This has very little impact on audio processing, so we can all go back to pretending that we live in a real, analog universe with no antecedents. End of aside).

Microphones and Microphones
Last year we had a nice visit with the ClearOne Beamforming ceiling microphone. This remains an impressive piece of technology,  but one with the inherent limitation of a need to be paired with an associated digital processing device. It is a very nice device, but at a very high cost. Is there another way to create a microphone array? Would I even be asking the rhetorical question if there wasn't?

German microphone manufacturer Beyerdynamic thinks that there is. One of their flagship products - the Revoluto - consists of seventeen microphone elements on a curved circuit board with analog summing elements. Nothing else. No digital processing, no magic. Just analog signals added together to create a single mic-level output. Beyerdynamic appears quite proud of this project, and has been adding "Revoluto technology" to its line of delegate mics.

As there are really few better ways to engage my skepticism than to make up a word and then promise the made-up-word technology in other products, I was glad to get my hands on a Revoluto and play with it. No, this won't be a product review and I didn't perform rigorous, technical measurements on it (what was the fate of our demo Revoluto? See here, on ExpresSHENs).

What I can say about it is this: it gives very clear voice reproduction at a surprising distance, with pick-up dropping off sharply as sources move off-axis. This makes it an especially interesting choice for huddle spaces in noisy rooms, assuming the noise sources are off-axis from talkers.

Test setup. Revoluto sitting in the pen tray, ceiling mic
hanging from the ceiling.

Does it actually work? On one simple set of tests (detailed above), the mic array certainly seems to perform as Beyerdynamic claims that it does. I didn't test it rigorously or thoroughly enough for a formal review or product comparison, but in a quick and basic setup it did a far better job than an analog ceiling microphone of rejecting the noise from an adjacent equipment rack full of noisy AV gear.

Overall, it's an interesting product and a nice reminder that thoughtfully crafted analog devices still have a very important place in our digital world.

Again The Same River - on Fandom, Art and Neurodiversity with an old Webcomic Friend

I recently stumbled across a list of seventeen completed webcomics to binge-read from beginning to end. (A webcomic, for those unfamiliar to the term, is exactly what it sounds like: a comic book delivered digitally via the internet. The art form has an interesting history, including some writers who have taken full advantage of the unlimited digital canvass to experiment with form. See my earlier post on Order of the Stick for more on webcomics). At the very end of the list, I was quite surprised to see an old friend I'd neither read nor really thought about in well over a decade now: T Campbell's Fans (previously titled Faans). It started off as a black-and-white geek-culture celebrating print comic about a science fiction fan club getting mixed up in real-world SF adventures including battles with invading space aliens, vampires, "men-in-black" style  secret government agents, and others. It started off as great silly fun, picking up depth and complexity. While some geek-culture comics seem to have vanished (ie, the comic-book loving Three Geeks) and others have remained frozen in amber, repeating the same jokes over and over for years (I'm thinking specifically of Jolly Blackburn's Knights of the Dinner Table), Fans seems to have run through a complete story with some surprises, real character development, and a beginning, middle, and end.  Reading all those years of strips I'd missed was an interesting experience, and one which opens some interesting questions.

Fans are Slans
The above phrase, referencing A E van Vogt's 1946 novel Slan, was at one time a rallying cry for science fiction fans. The implication is clear to those who'd read the novel: fans are looked down upon despite being smarter,  more interconnected, and just better than regular "mundanes" (the fannish word for a non-fan). They saw themselves as the future of which everyone else is afraid. The early adventures of Campbell's characters reflect this attitude: the only ones prepared to protect the world against fantastic threats are those who've lived the fantastic in their imagination.

This attitude seems to have faded as science fiction and fantasy have become more mainstream and, to his credit, it's one with which Campbell seems to have become increasingly uncomfortable in his writing. As the comic wandered further from fan culture it thankfully dropped this attitude. We still end up with a quirky group of characters repeatedly saving the world from increasingly strange and high-stakes threats, but the emphasis on fandom fades significantly. This is a nice thing, and makes the series feel both more universal and less geek-snobbish. The final chapters involve a "next generation" in which most of the original fans have backed away from the saving-the-world business to settle in for some form of happy ending. 

And about those happy endings, there IS a touch of sentimentality at points, and I found the resolution of one love-triangle to be a bit wish-fulfillment-ish. Your mileage may vary, but it leads to another interesting positive. 

On Neurodiversity and Non-standard families

We end up with some  non-standard family arrangements (including a three-person marriage), and quite a few characters who would certainly be identified as either on the autism spectrum or otherwise mentally not normal. There is a bit of the autism-as-superpower trope with one character, but there are also cases in which different thought patterns - particularly cretaive, visual thinking - are more valuable than traditional analytical thinking. This makes a bit of the case for the neurodiversity movement - those who view what many of us see as mental impairments (particularly the autism spectrum) as differences to be celebrated rather than disabilities to be overcome. I have no idea as to whether or not this is intentional, but one art has an existence apart from the creator and one way to judge great art is by asking if it can be viewed more than one way, with more than one message. This is one of the messages I see in Fans. It's also a thought which I find interesting in the real world; while some people with autism or other conditions are truly unable to function in society, there's still plenty of room between what we consider "normal" and unable to function in society. It's something worth thinking about.

Various characters also end up happily single, in a three-way marriage and, perhaps most surpisingly in a traditional nuclear family. The people we care about all get happy endings, but they're all different happy endings - and not the ones a reader would envision on first meeting the characters. Most ring true though, as character grow to be something more. In a way it reminds me a bit of the aforementioned Order of the Stick in that we  start with archetypes who eventually grow into people. 

Worth Reading?

They say you can't cross the same river twice, as the river has changed and so have you. This is true, and the experience wasn't the same.Reading a completed webcomic is not the same as reading one as it's published; the anticipation between pages is a part of the experience which is hard to duplicate. On the positive side, there's none of the frustration in having to wait for the rest of the story; one can read at ones own pace.   Was this worth the time to read? I thought so, and not soley for the nostalgia value. Fans features exploration of different art styles, some real surprises, and a great deal of fun. Highly recommended for those into the webcomic form or playful sci-fi. 

Acquisition Summer - Some thoughts on the latest goings-on in the world of commercial AV

Greetings, friends and followers! My apologies for the various obligations (professional and personal), side-projects, and secret adventures which have kept me away from these pages for the past week. After a weekend off the grid at an undisclosed location I'm refreshed and ready to dive into all of the news in AV-land on this, the last fortnight before Infocomm 2014. You can expect more book reviews, at least one technology piece (sneak peek: the first half of my working title is "in praise of analog: a visit with ...") , some more words on behalf of my team at SMW at ExpresSHENs (those reading this for the AV posts should really stop by there; in addition to my occasional words there are posts from some of the brilliant people with whom I'm luck enough to work), and, perhaps, a surprise or two. Then, a fortnight from now, I'll be off to Infocomm. First, the news.

Kramer buys half of WowVision
I'll start with what would have been a minor bombshell any other month: Kramer Electronics acquisition of one half of Wowvision. Kramer doesn't have quite the profile or perceived place in the industry as the "big three", but they're a very capable manufacturer with a diverse catalog of products, mostly in video switching and distribution but also with more than a toe-hold in the worlds of control and audio. With the purchase of Wowvision they are teasing the premier of two new products, to be launched at Infocomm.

This allows Kramer to neatly and quickly fill the wireless collaboration/BYOD hole in their product lineup. I've gotten my hands on a WowVision Collab8 to play with and evaluate. Thus far it presents itself as a fairly powerful device with quite a few options and capabilities, but with a handful of limitations and some awkwardness in its interface  that prevent it from being a great universal solution. This is fine: there are few universal solutions in the world. WowVision's product does fill a role for a certain kind of project, and I'm quite curious to see how Kramer wraps it up to make the technology their own and how the Kramer solution ends up working.

The other interesting thing here is that with their new products, Kramer will join Crestron as the only switching/routing/control company to offer a wireless collaboration solution. I don't know of anything in this arena forthcoming from Aurora Multimedia, Lightware, Purelink, Extron, AMX, or any of the other players in this arena. Depending on the level of polish and capability, this could be a significant differentiator for Kramer in the ability to offer a single-product solution. The Kramer booth isn't usually the hot-ticket at Infocomm, but perhaps this year it should be.

Harman buys AMX

Crown amplifier with Blu-link

This was the big bombshell last week. By now nearly everyone has opined on it, from Josh Srago to Tim Albright through scores of professionals on LinkedIn who took the time to sing praises or cast stones at the recently acquired AMX. What are my thoughts? I have a few. On the acquisition itself, I feel cautiously optimistic. Harman's brands operate largely independently and continue to not only produce solid hardware but also to develop new products (ie, Crown's Drivecore and various additions to the Soundweb London family). Given Harman's track record, I expect them to do their best to run the AMX brand while leveraging their existing marketing and distribution arms in an attempt to increase their market share. The latter is one of Harman's strengths; they've done an excellent job creating relationships within the industry and in marketting their other brands. I'm curious to see how their plans for AMX unfold. 

What I'm not expecting is a leap into high-end audio; Harman's audio brands will most likely remain their audio brands for those who need such things. Could I see blu-link as an option as an audio output for all-in-ones or matrix switchers? Possibly. That's all details.

What did I find most interesting about this? Someone else pointed out the comparison to the Nest acquisition by Google, in which a company with fewer products (OK, a company with only one product) was purchased for 10 times the value of AMX. If Google wanted control, wouldn't the latter have been a better buy? It obviously would, but that makes one thing very clear: large-scale commercial AV control systems are not an important item for anyone outside out corner of the industry. The chance to get into houses with a thermostat is worth more than the chance to get into boardrooms or high-end home theaters with a touchpanel. Why? Because everybody has a thermostat, while not everybody has a home theater. A connected thermostat learns about you; it learns about your overall activity cycle, it knows when you go on vacation, it knows when your house is empty. A dedicated AV control system knows when you're watching television, and that's about all. It means that, as big as the control companies may feel to us, they're smaller players in a larger world which includes all levels of consumer tech. 

These acquisitions, as big as they are (and the AMX one is huge) say as much about what the industry does and doesn't value as it does about the individual companies. 

That's my two cents on last week's events. Stay tuned for products, book reviews, and more as we lead into Infocomm!

Appreciating The Small Things. A quick glance at new products from Revolabs and Listentech

Summer is coming, and with it new product releases. I've been lucky enough to get a few sneak peeks at new products due for release this Infocomm. I've not seen anything quite earth shattering or revolutionary as of yet, but a string of reminders as to how small, thoughtful decisions can create significant improvements. There are things which don't always show up  on a spec sheet, but that make a difference in what it is like to live with a product. I'll give two examples, from two manufacturers.

Small. Square. Fits nicely in a 2RU rack drawer.
Front-left is the wedge-shaped cardiod.

First up, Revolabs. After announcing their next-generation of wireless boundary microphones at Infocomm last year, they are finally ready to debut this Infocomm. We at SMW were fortunate enough to get our hands on a beta set for some experimentation and evaluation. I'll leave comparative  performance for another day, but wanted to remark now on the sleek, modern form factor. They are a bit larger than the old Executive HD mics, but have a great advantage in shape. The omnidirectional mics are squares, with soft-buttons for mute on each side. The cardiods are also square, but with one edge lifted up in a wedge shape to give a clear indication of the mic's directionality. The same square base is promised for the upcoming wireless goosenecks, and hard-wired microphones might be on their roadmap. This is a great idea in, for example, a divisible space with a portable "leaf" between fixed conference tables. One might want to use hardwired mics for the permanent tables and wireless mics for the portable furniture. If so, it would create a more unified experience to have the wireless and hardwired mics all the same size and shape, and have that shape be something appealing. Again, not a product I've thoroughly evaluated as of yet, but one which is, at the very least, interesting.

New receiver, old necktie. I'm listening to
audio of Cory Schaefer hang gliding
(or something like that).

The good people at Listentech are also in New York showing off their new hardware, including a demo of the Televic delegate systems with whom they are partnered (a demo which I succeeded in briefly crashing, but which did recover nicely). Long-time readers of this blog should know that I'm familiar with Listentech, having been through their Level 2 hearing loop training last year. They aren't showing any big improvements to their assistive listening lines at present, but have some nice incremental improvements which I was delighted to see. The receivers are now smaller, have audio jacks on both sides into which you can very comfortably plug a neck loop. In an even niftier twist, the neck-loop itself has an 3.5mm audio jack, naturally falling around collarbone-level. This allows the use of very short headphone wires, eliminating tangles. They also have new pendant-style IR receivers with the option of standard headphones as well as the "stethoscope" style. ListenTech's VP of global sales, Corey Schaeffer, took the time to travel here to New York to give some of us here a sneak peek. Her time - and the chance to bend her ear about the rest of my wish-list (Energy-star certified loop amplifiers, Dante connectivity, etc) was much appreciated.

This is one reason I like to look at technology in person, hold it in my hands, and play with it. Sometimes we need to look beyond the spec sheets, at what technology is like to live with and how thoughtful manufacturers have been in designing them.

In Defense of a Less Neutral Network

The FCC made waves last week with an announcement that they are dropping their long-standing position on "net-neutrality" - the idea that all internet traffic should be treated equally by internet service providers. This is something with direct impact on an increasingly network-centric AV industry, and one about which several of my fellow AV bloggers have discussed. While I remain in the pro-neutrality camp, I can see a rational argument for moving away from neutrality if it is done in an open and transparent manner. What's the argument against neutrality? Why do I reject it? Read on.

It is the consumer side of AV industry which is driving us away from neutrality - mostly streaming video. Not too many years ago, video content and network traffic were two completely separate systems. Consumers would watch television shows via their cable television provider and would rent or purchase movies in the form of physical media. While more users had broadband internet connections, relatively few had their computers connected to the large flat-panel TVs in their house. Changes came both in technology and habit. The technological change is the proliferation of streaming appliances such as Apple TV, Roku, and "smart" TVs with integrated streaming services. The change in habit is an increased tendency to watch content on mobile devices; as these don't read physical media, streaming has become the only option for what is an increasingly heavily used stream. At present, some estimates claim that Netflix and Youtube combine for over half of internet traffic during peak hours.

How does this form an argument against neutrality? Two ways. First, overall capacity needs to match overall demand. Second, there are qualitative expectations in speed of delivery and tolerance for network lag. (For an illustration of the bandwidth versus lag, see Randall Munroe's thought-experiment on a super-high bandwidth but slow-response time solution).

Take three example: Skype,  Hulu+ and Weightless Books (I chose Weightless because, in addition to being illustrative , they're a favorite of mine. Always DRM free, which is a topic for another post). We expect something less than high-definition video on a Skype call, but any delay at all is intolerable. If one moves beyond Skype to a video bridging service or cloud-based MCU (ie, Blue Jeans Network, Pexip, etc), video resolution (and, therefore, bandwidth) requirements might be even higher. In any event, what a network engineer would refer to as Quality of Service (QoS) is very important in this case, as is bandwidth.

Streaming video is, likewise, a high-bandwidth application. This will only get worse with the coming of 4K video. I know the caveats; there isn't much 4K content. What content there is will be compressed for delivery over wide area networks. Most people can't distinguish between 10 and 12 bit color depth, and most hardware configurations aren't going to give real value for 4K content anyway. That said, 4K is likely coming the same way 1080p has come, the same way 720p before that.

Now let's move to our online bookseller. I downloaded, just to pick a random example, a copy of Plato's Republic. It's 830 kilobytes, well under one second of a high-definition movie. Most people will download one book every week or so, while they might watch a TV show or make a Skype call on a daily basis.

So one could argue that booksellers, newspapers without video content, blogs, and other text-intensive types of websites are subsidizing the Netflixes and YouTubes of the world. An end to neutrality would let carriers pass along the cost of a high-speed, low-latency network to those who actually need it, while charging others a lower rate for technically inferior service which is still appropriate for their use. (if an ebook takes a minute instead of ten seconds to download, nobody will feel all that inconvenienced).

In other words, tiered service makes a measure of sense because in a strictly neutral net we all end up paying for the most intense use cases. An end to neutrality might hurt video delivery, but could be a boon for newspapers and booksellers. 

Does this mean I'm on the corporate bandwagon against net neutrality? Those of you who have known an followed me here would rightly expect otherwise. There are at least two clear pitfalls. The lesser pitfall is a higher barrier to entry in the streaming video market. If the cost of a "fast-lane" reaches a high enough premium smaller entities looking to join the markets won't be able to compete with the larger, established players. This could easily create a decrease in choice as niche products without broad appeal have a hard time buying speedier service.

The greater pitfall lies in the creation of vertical monopolies and the inherent competitive advantage they bring. Time Warner and Comcast are both not only distributors of media, but also creators. This, in essence, allows Comcast to "pay" the higher distribution costs for NBCUniversal generated content by taking money out of its left pocket and tucking it into its right pocket.  This one factor - that the larger corporate parent keeps the payment for extra speed - invalidates every argument I made in favor of a less neutral net.

I see two solutions of benefit to consumers. First and, perhaps best, would be a return to neutrality. This has the advantage of not only being easiest to accomplish (the monopolies are NOT going to be broken up anytime soon), and of creating the most clear, consistent, and most easily regulated set of rules.

The second solution? A combination of divestment of content creators by content distributors (and vice-versa) and complete transparency in pricing. If creators and distributors were separate there could be a level playing field. That this could be a playing field allowing lower-tier pricing for non-video content could be, to the majority of users - a plus. Is the political will (or, for that matter, the legal structure) there to break the monopolies? I doubt it. So, we're back where we started, with neutrality being the best - or at least most practical - idea.