The explosion of media outlets changed our consumption habits. From a world with TV and Cinema, we are facing a wide selection of products and applications, fighting for our free time. Video on Demand, Digital Video Recorders, Sling boxes, smartphones, iPhones, iPODs, and Portable Media Players invaded our lives, and are here to stay. However, these products and technologies
not only change the way we consume media, but also create a long list of issues. What are the usability challenges we are facing? How does DRM affect our usage rights on content that we purchase? And how does interoperability fits to this game?

Daniel Berninger joined Tier1 Research in August 2004 as Senior Analyst covering telecom. Daniel has over a decade of experience that includes helping to launch three prominent VoIP startups - ITXC, Vonage, and Free World Dialup. His expertise on the intersection of telecom and the Internet has been sought by Congress, FCC, Federal Reserve, and state PSCs. Daniel led early VoIP deployments at Verizon, HP, and NASA for VocalTec Communications. He won the 1999 VON Pioneer Award for co-founding the VON Coalition and worked on the original assessment of VoIP at Bell Laboratories. He completed doctoral studies in preparation for a Ph.D. in System Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kfir Pravda is an independent consultant, facilitating cooperation between media and technology companies. He is also the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development of the International Multimedia Telecommunication Consortium (IMTC), where he is responsible on the organization’s message, strategic processes and overall marketing activities. Kfir was involved in the formation and strategy of several joint ventures, such as the Star Map Alliance, headed sales efforts to European mobile operators, chiefly T-Mobile International, and formed several media ventures.

Chris Steck is Director of Technology Strategy for RealNetworks where he owns the technology roadmap for Real’s media delivery products and services and directs Real’s standards body initiatives. Chris is also the CTO and a board member of the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium. In the past Chris has architected CTI call control software for Interactive Voice Response and also worked on networking and communications protocols and APIs at Microsoft including the Telephony API (TAPI), WinSock II, IP Multicast and RSVP. He’s also founded a startup for embedded VoIP PBX and call control software for WiFi access points, and architected mobile data services software for J2ME and smartphone devices.