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Pulver fires up himself at VON

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SAN JOSE--Jeff Pulver, CEO of pulver.com, has been called a technology guru by no less than BusinessWeek. But by his own admission this week, as he addressed the throng of 8000 attendees at his VON Conference in San Jose, Calif., when he started his mission to advance voice and video on the Internet 10 years ago, he didn’t have a clue--at least about telecom.

“As Paul Simon sang, ‘My lack of education hasn’t hurt me none,’” Pulver said.

But over these 10 years, Pulver has succeeded in being disruptive and has encouraged others to be disruptive. He now says--according to the theme of this year’s event--that the industry is finally on the eve of that disruption.

And it appears that after 10 years, with mission nearly accomplished in the voice arena, Pulver is returning to his disruptive roots and putting the video back in VON. The prospect seems to have re-energized him.

“While VoIP has never seen greater penetration, there is no doubt that over the next seven to 10 years, the whole world is going to VoIP for voice,” Pulver said. “But there’s more.”

Where VoIP has disrupted telecom, the industry now has the opportunity to disrupt broadcasting, he said and ripped off his shirt to display the logo of his favorite new tech-toy from Sling Media.

The company’s Sling Player is the client for its Slingbox product. Slingbox enables you to watch your own home TV programming from wherever you are over the Internet.

In his blog, Pulver called the technology a personal change agent for himself. He now sees, and encouraged the audience to see, IPTV in its inverse form: TV-over-IP. The difference being that IPTV is a service that will provide a cable-like broadcast service, though possibly better and more interactive, over the broadband pipe coming in the home. TV-over-IP is like taking your home TV service with you.

Pulver.com is already in the process of building its own TV studio, which Pulver said, would previously have required a multi-million dollar investment.

“We could argue about QoS right now, but we all know that given enough bandwidth, you could do just about anything,” Pulver said. “And if you make content available and cheap enough, people will buy it.”

Pulver said disrupting the broadcast industry is a great opportunity to limit the ability of Madison Avenue to get in one’s face with advertising. But mostly, it is an opportunity to create a whole a new platform for content creators.

“With disruptive broadcasting, anyone in the world could become a TV mogul,” Pulver said.

He also said it won’t be long before the movie industry is debuting films on the Internet or before shows with large fan bases like American Idol can tell Fox goodbye and move to the Internet.

All this disruption will depend, Pulver said, on the issue of net neutrality.

“We are living the benefits of the academic Internet, but when people get greedy all bets are off. So we have to be careful that whatever comes next, we need to maintain the same freedoms that have allowed people to go out and change the world,” Pulver said.

Jon Arnold, principal at J. Arnold & Associates is also bullish on video. “The broadcast industry doesn’t know what’s going to hit them yet. We are at the very beginning of what will be exciting about IP. Voice is the easy part,” he said.


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