SAN ANTONIO – There were no official numbers at press time but boy, it sure seems real crowded here at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo – a good thing for the vendors, who filled every open space this year.
Here’s a bit of what www.cartt.ca heard and saw today.
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This morning’s CTO session was interesting on a number of levels. The panelists were Tony Werner, senior vice-president and CTO Liberty Media, (and also a former Rogers CTO), Mike Hayashi, senior v-p advance engineering and subscriber technology at Time Warner Cable, Paul Woidke, vice-president technology for Comcast Spotlight, and Richard Prodan, v-p and CTO Broadcom.
Werner on fibre to the home:
“If money was no object – and a lot of companies have thought this just before they ran out of money – fibre to the home is quite a thick medium. But the fact is that money is an object and fibre to the home is very expensive and for at least 10 years… I don’t believe fibre to the home will have any technical advantage over HFC.”
The panel then began talking about Microsoft’s IPTV and the trouble Switzerland’s Swisscom is having trying to launch the product. While Liberty owns no North American cable companies, it owns a number MSOs all over the world and Werner had this to say about Swisscom and Microsoft’s IPTV in general – which may or may not impact Bell Canada and Telus, both of which have said they’re going to launch IPTV this year in their territories.
“It looks like Microsoft is delayed, that it’s wrapped a lot of proprietary stuff around their solution, that the costs are high, and it’s starting to scare some of the telcos away from it,” said Werner.
“There’s supposedly some concern inside SBC, (which is) not confirmed. Certainly Swisscom is having lots of issues with that but there are certainly companies like Myrio and a few others that have got working product out there and I think they may be delayed. They may have startup issues, just like we will have with our VOIP products and other things, I think they may have a few more issues, but they ultimately will get it right.”
“Trying to do an IPTV launch over a very small bandwidth pipe and it’s limited to a single set in the household which they realize is not adequate for what they ultimately want to do.”
Watch out for the sales advantage in fibre to the home, Werner added later. In Japan, he said, while his company’s HFC plant typically outperforms the FTTH option, people are swayed by the word fibre in the sales pitch.
“Just the term fibre is a sales term and even my Grandma knows that fibre is good… not that (kind of fibre)… and they will buy it and even though in Japan it’s an inferior service to ours, fibre to the home has just passed cable modems,” he said. “Just the words ‘we’ve got fibre to the home’ sells and I think this is something that Verizon will have a little bit of luck with and we need to come up with better marketing terms for what we call our network.
“Fibre to the home impresses people.”
Hayashi was asked point-blank by session moderator and tech guru Leslie Ellis: do you have enough bandwidth for everything that’s on the network and everything that’s coming? Yes, said Hayashi.
“If we continue to deploy linear channels the way that we have in the past, you don’t have to be a mad scientist to figure that out, you will run out.” But, deploying the many technologies on display at this show means bandwidth will not run out until after he retires, said Hayashi.
“There are an awful lot of tools and tricks with more upside than strictly adding bandwidth,” added Werner.
This may not be music to the ears of Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta, but Hayashi says his company is interested in breaking up the set top box duopoly and working with consumer electronic manufacturers. This is a recurring theme every year here though, and yet MSOs still keep buying Motorola and S-A.
“If you look at (Motorola and S-A’s) total R&D spent on set top boxes, and you compare that to the R&D dollars spent by the entire CE industry, I think it’s close to a round-off error,” he said, “and in a competitive market, we do need time to market.
“For example, by this Christmas you will see Blue Ray HD TV recorders. I would like to have that as an offering to our consumers but it’s not going to happen,” because it’s not in the tool kit of the set top suppliers.
He said Time Warner is working seriously with CE makers, calling it “critical” to his company’s future.
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In other news from the show…
Scopus Network Technologies and TVC Canada today announced that regional telco Télébec, has deployed the Scopus Intelligent Video Gateway (IVG) solution and E-90 MPEG encoders to support all-digital playout of regional broadcasts for Cablevision, the company’s cable subsidiary.
The Scopus installation, launched in May, has allowed Télébec to move its analog channels to digital and thereby realize improved image quality and much greater capacity in terms of channel count.
“The IVG solution from Scopus provides a straightforward means for managing and moving video over IP, and we have been very impressed with both the technical performance of the new gear and the excellent picture quality it provides,” said Bernard Gauthier, general manager at Cablevision, in the press release. “By implementing the Scopus solutions, we have seen immediate improvement in the quality of service we offer our customers. We also have built a much firmer foundation for offering a broader range of channels and advanced services such as video on demand or even interactive services.”
The E-90 professional MPEG-2 encoders are installed at three local TV stations that serve the Télébec service areas of Val d’Or and Rouyn-Noranda. Scopus’ decades of experience in developing state-of-the-art video compression technologies allows the E-90 to provide high video quality at low bit rates.
A portion of Scopus system, the IVG-7400 Intelligent Broadband IP Streamer at the Télébec headend aggregates all feeds from the stations, “grooms” them, and distributes them over IP to cable TV subscribers. The IVG-7400 is a full-featured system and is capable of supporting hundreds of TV services, transported at wire-speed over its Gigabit Ethernet output. Within coming months, all local and community channels distributed by Télébec will be digitally encoded.
Télébec worked with TVC Canada to install encoders at each station and the remote head end, and within days the IVG and E-90 systems were up and running, supporting the company’s digital channels.
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Sandvine, Waterloo, Ont., announced today the addition of Cape Breton’s Seaside Communications to its customer roll. Sandvine’s solutions empower broadband service providers with tools to understand subscriber behavior, protect valuable applications such as VOIP and gaming from malicious attacks (worms, spam trojan, DoS, and DNS attack traffic), differentiate services, and ensure subscriber quality of experience (QoE).
As service providers grow their networks and offer differentiated IP services, cable operators such as Seaside need visibility into their traffic to maximize network resources for subscribers and their applications.
“As we add more subscribers to our network who make greater demands for new applications, we need to accommodate by offering the best possible online experience,” said Shane Ferguson, director of network operations, Seaside Communications. “We chose Sandvine’s intelligent broadband management solution so we can ensure subscribers continue to experience high quality of service on their most valued applications.”
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The passengers on one flight arriving in San Antonio carrying Canadians – including Cogeco’s Andre Schermel, we hear – had a few nervous minutes prior to landing. The plane’s cockpit indicator that says whether or not the landing gear was down malfunctioned, necessitating a fly-by of the tower to see if the gear was down or not. It was, but the San Antonio airport brought out all the emergency gear just in case it wasn’t quite right
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Digital simulcasting and switching is one of the main themes here this week. Cable operators on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border are simulcasting in digital and analog right now, which takes up valuable space on the network. Switching, where the cable operator decides to make broadly available across the network only the most popular channels, reserving the others for switching.
That doesn’t mean the other channels have gone anywhere, just that they’re not in every node and are delivered to the customer as they request them, appearing seamlessly to them when the change the channel.
BigBand Networks was showing its BMR simulcasters and its BME50 switcher and talking about the potential for a unicast model in the not-too-distant future, said v-p Seth Kenvin. The company also announced the integration of the Cuda CMTS (cable modem termination system) with back-office data systems based on IPDR/SP (Internet Protocol Detail Record Streaming Protocol). The integration is being demonstrated for tracking of IP video telephony usage.
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At the overflowing Scientific-Atlanta booth, the company’s Digital Content Manager is the main launch this year. DCM addresses demands for digital simulcast and ad insertion, switched digital broadcast, more HD and on-demand digital channels.
Operators are faced with an increase in both the number and complexity of MPEG video streams processed, says Greg Hardy, v-p and g.m. headend and network monitoring transmission network systems. The new high-density networked MPEG processing DCM is versatile, with a ton of processing power – about 20 times the MPEG processing capability of traditional multiplexing equipment currently in use.
The ability to simultaneously process up to 2,000 standard definition (SD) or up to 500 high-definition (HD) MPEG video streams from a single platform means flexibility for operators in multiplexing architectures, as well as scalability and cost-per-stream savings in the 30 to 40% range, said Hardy. It’ll ship by October 31st.
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Mississauga’s amplifier solutions company Cableserv was pumping its new SM-PS-I: Status Monitoring Power Supply Interface. It’s designed to connect the system power supply and the DOCSIS Network Monitoring Device. This allows a single hard cable connection from the power supply enclosure to the CATV network. The single cable then carries both the AC power and the DOCSIS RF monitoring signals, thus eliminating the need for a second cable and a separate inserter.
Another product getting a good look, said president Audley Alexander, is the -48V DC Power Supply for the S-A Prisma I Optical Platform. It’s a performance enhanced product, which gives MSOs the ability to convert their S-A Prisma Optical Platform powering from 115 V AC to -48 V DC or simply replace and existing -48 V DC power supply in such a platform.
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VOD supplier Concurrent, which is distributed in Canada by TVC, and deployed with Cogeco and Videotron, showed off its IMS (Interactive Media Solution) navigation tool which is interoperable with all systems and all legacy navigation applications. It allows MSOs to stream content while the customer is navigating, so that if their looking for action movies, they’ll see action content as they look, for example.
Or, if the customer is looking for TMN on demand content, the background, video trailers and logo could be branded TMN, for example, probably for a price, from the MSO.
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The last, newest, word comes from Concurrent’s director of marketing, Tim Dodge. With a world awash in acronyms and newly created words and near-words, he passed along another, which he doesn’t claim ownership of, but thought it could catch on: VoViDa. It’s the triple-play word, for voice, video and data.
– Greg O’Brien
