LOS ANGELES–In a continuing break with their long-time public stance, North America’s largest cable operators are now openly racing to embrace IP video technology for their expanding portfolios of video offerings.
In a panel discussion at the Cable Show here this week, the chief technology officers and senior engineering executives of five major MSOs said they’re all looking to switch their cable systems to IP video so they can offer more video fare, reach more display devices, and cut delivery costs. At least one of the large MSOs, Time Warner Cable, is reportedly gearing up for an IP video trial now while the other four are actively exploring how to carry out the migration.
"We do need to embrace it [IP video]," said Scott Hatfield, executive vice-president and CTO of Cox Communications. “The economics of IP are different."
Dermot O’Carroll, senior vice-president of access networks for Rogers Communications, said his company hasn’t made any firm decisions on its IP video approach yet. But he added the company expects to migrate to IP technology soon so that it can deliver video to both mobile devices and devices in the home. “We’d like to have the same CDN (content delivery network) for all video,” he said, “which implies an IP-based CDN.”
Mike LaJoie, executive vice-president and CTO of Time Warner Cable, explained the idea is to deliver all of its services to "the broadest panoply of devices." "It’s really about converging all of our services over an IP pipe all the way to the home and making them available wirelessly,” he said. “It changes the game a lot."
While Time Warner hasn’t admitted anything publicly yet, the MSO is preparing to stage an IP video trial here in Los Angeles using Microsoft’s Mediaroom platform, according to a report in Light Reading Cable. When asked about the purported trial by panel moderator Leslie Ellis, LaJoie said he hadn’t read the report. But, in response to the question about “a love-fest going on with Microsoft,” he said "there’s no love-fest” between the two companies.
(Mediaroom is the platform which Telus, Bell and MTS have built their IPTV service upon.)
Tony Werner, executive vice-president and CTO of Comcast, said IP video technology will help cable operators meet the growing demand from subscribers as they snap up more IP-enabled devices and use them to watch video fare. In part, Comcast aims to do that by relying on its fiber backbone and still-developing CDN.
“It’s less about IP and more about satisfying the growing demand from consumers," he said. “What I worry about most is that consumer and consumer device sophistication are growing so rapidly. We need to get in lockstep with that.”
For Comcast, what really crystallized the notion of delivering video to IP-based devices was the debut of Apple’s iPad last month, according to Werner. "It’s really a great device for video consumption," he said. "There’s more video consumed on that device than any other device short of the television… We need to have an easy way to get our content to them."
While cable operators agree that they must adopt IPTV, there’s no industry consensus on the best way to do it just yet. Cable engineers are now studying and debating three different basic approaches, with some variation among them. Some engineers are leaning towards piping video over the cable modem termination system (CMTS) as port costs drop. Others favor CMTS "bypass" architectures that send video through the edge QAMs. Still others are intrigued about powerful new home gateways that can manage new IP video services as well as cable’s legacy RF-based offerings.
For instance, Comcast favors the CMTS approach. Although "all of the above are still viable options," Werner said the "end goal" to pipe video through the CMTS. Calling that approach "more eloquent and more efficient" than the other two methods, he said CMTS port costs are falling rapidly and will “soon” reach parity with other approaches.
But such other large cable operators as Time Warner and Suddenlink Communications like the home gateway concept best. Terry Cordova, senior vice president and CTO of Suddenlink, said such a residential IP gateway would enable the MSO to manage its legacy set-top boxes while deploying IP-based boxes and other new IP video devices.
Although cable operators are eager to leverage low-cost IPTV boxes and the other benefits of the technology, the MSO panelists said the switchover certainly won’t happen overnight. "It won’t be a flash-cut," Cordova said. "It will be a transitional period."
LaJoie agreed that cable operators will not do a "hard cut" to IP video. "You’ll see MPEG-2 transport boxes in our network for another 10 years — because they will still work,” he said. “Some of our customers don’t want to get connected to IP… it’s not interesting to them."
O’Carroll agreed too, arguing that cable operators will need to keep using conventional video delivery methods as well as IPTV. "Our job is to deliver services to our customers,” he said. “Our customers are not going all-IP. We’re going to have to do both for a long time.”
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network. He helped cover the 2010 Cable Show for Cartt.ca.
