Powering What’s Next in Converged Media

Timothy Dodd, VP and general manager, Neustar Media

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/25/2012 12:01:00 AM

With all the talk about TV Everywhere, it’s easy to forget just how hard it still is for many consumers to access the movies and TV shows they have purchased on all their devices. Often, incompatible operating systems and other issues make it difficult, if not impossible, simply to move content between mobile devices, PCs and TVs.

Finding ways to overcome that problem and get more content onto more devices has dominated the career of Timothy Dodd, whose successes in the area of converged media landed him on the 2012 Next Wave 0f Leaders list.

“Converged media has been the major theme of my career,” notes Dodd, first as VP of technology policy at Time Warner Cable between 2003 and 2008 and then at Warner Bros., where he was VP of corporate business development and strategy from 2008-10.

While at Warner Bros. Dodd was involved in the formation of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), a large consortium of about 75 major consumer electronics manufacturers, Hollywood studios, multichannel operators and TV companies. Dodd was then so involved in the DECE’s UltraViolet project that he was hired by one of the effort’s major players, Neustar, in 2010.

This ambitious effort allows anyone who purchases an UltraViolet-enabled DVD or Blu-Ray disk to then have cloud-based access to an electronic copy of the content on a number of authenticated devices. Neustar has a central role in the effort by supplying the technologies for a secure digital locker that lets consumers access and manage their personal digital entertainment libraries from the cloud.

The initial work has drawn some criticism for its clunky authentication process, but Dodd notes they are about to deploy a greatly simplified interface and that they have made considerable progress, adding Walmart and Amazon as retail partners and increasing the UltraViolet titles to more than 5,000.

Meanwhile, Neustar is also involved in providing technology that will allow broadcasters to authenticate devices for the launch of mobile DTV services this year. The company is also looking to help other industries, including gaming and book and magazine publishers, offer consumers access to digital content in the cloud. “UltraViolet is just one example of how digital distribution is going to the cloud,” he says— and yet another example of Dodd’s many accomplishments.