TORONTO – Although they’re seeking to upgrade to IP video as quickly as possible, four of North America’s largest cable operators don’t expect legacy video services and devices to disappear from the landscape for many years..
Speaking at the fourth annual SCTE Canadian Summit here earlier this week, top engineering executives from Rogers Communications, Comcast Cable, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks said they view IP video as the best way to deliver more advanced features and applications to subscribers, such as multi-screen services, network DVRs, interactive TV applications and converged services. In a wide-ranging session moderated by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien, they also said they see IP video as the way to reach the rapidly growing number of new IP-enabled devices, including smart TVs, game consoles, tablets and smart phones.
“Comcast is very bullish on IP,” said Ray Celona, senior vice-president of national engineering and technical operations for Comcast Cable. Citing estimates that the average U.S. home will have at least six IP-enabled devices by 2015, he noted that Comcast has been testing its new IP-enabled service, known as X1, in Augusta, Georgia and plans to roll it out later this year.
All four MSO executives said their companies will end up deploying some type of IP video gateway in customers’ homes to serve all these broadband-enabled devices. These gateways will either attach directly to TV sets like current-day cable set-tops or sit in basements or utility closets, distributing video signals around the home.
But none of the MSO officials expect the transformation to an all-IP home to occur quickly or neatly. Instead, most think that they will be sending legacy QAM video signals to households for some time to come, then using hybrid QAM/IP video gateways in the home to transcode the signals to IP video, at least partly because of the need to serve legacy TV sets that can’t be easily upgraded or replaced.
“It’s inevitable,” Celona said. “It is a hybrid world.”
Along the same lines, the four top MSP technologists don’t see the traditional cable set-top box going away any time soon. Instead, they believe that digital set-tops will linger in homes for the rest of the decade, if not longer. “The classic set-top will be around for a long time,” said Dermot O’Carroll, senior vice president of access networks for Rogers. “There will be a [set-top] device in the home for a long, long time.”
Jeff Chen, senior vice president of advanced technology at Bright House Networks (and a former Rogers’ engineer), went even further. “It’s [the set-top box] a necessary evil,” he said. He noted that without cable set-tops, consumers would have to switch out their smart TVs every two or three years because of service and feature upgrades.
Asked by O’Brien about their budding TV Everywhere ambitions, all four cable executives said their companies are technically ready to serve multiple video devices both inside and outside the home. The only thing that’s stopping them from serving devices anywhere, they said, is that they lack the legal right to beam most programming beyond the home.
“That’s not a technical question,” said Jim Ludington, executive vice president of Time Warner Cable, which has started serving tablets, smart phones and PCs inside the home and has been chomping at the bit to beam programming to devices outside the home as well. “It’s a content question, it’s a rights question.”
Responding to another question from O’Brien, the four MSO engineers said they expect to extend their fibre lines closer to customers’ homes over the next few years by shrinking node and service group sizes. They also expect to bring higher modulation schemes closer to the home, boosting bandwidth capacity and the quality of service.
“The beauty of the HFC [hybrid fiber-coax] network is that we can go progressively node by node closer to the home,” O’Carroll said.”I think it just gets better.”
But the executives agreed that cable operators will likely not extend their fiber lines all the way to a subscriber’s TV set, PC or even home because there’s no need to do so. “Fiber will go deeper and deeper [into the network],” Chen said. “But I don’t see fiber going straight to the back of the TV. There will still be conversion [to coax] somewhere.”
Ludington put it more bluntly. “We’ll take fiber to where the money is,” he said. “We’ll take it to where it makes the most business sense.”
Similarly, the cable technologists expect to expand their wireless broadband reach much further. For instance, Time Warner Cable is looking to increase the number of Wi-Fi hotspots in its footprint from about 1,000 today to more than 10,000 by the end of the year.
But they don’t see ever abandoning their existing wireline networks in favor of wireless because of the wired plant’s greater bandwidth capacity. “Anything that’s wireless turns to wireline very quickly,” Ludington said, noting that mobile providers rely heavily on wired links to cell towers and base stations. “All that’s wireless is wireline.”
Celona agreed. “Wireless is an extension,” he said, “not a replacement.”
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network.
From left, Cartt.ca’s Greg O’Brien, Bright House’s Jeff Chen, Time Warner Cable’s Jim Ludington, Comcast’s Ray Celona and Rogers’ Dermot O’Carroll. Photo courtesy SCTE.
