June 2008

I missed the roundtable at SCTE yesterday with Motorola, Japanese cable operator JCom and Heavy Reading’s Alan Breznick, but I’m catching up on the presentation notes. JCom debuted its DOCSIS 3.0 service two months ago with a premium speed tier of 160 Mbps. According to the operator, 25% of new Internet subscribers since then have signed on for the 160-Mbps service. Amazing. Of course that might have something to do with the fact that the new speed tier is only five dollars more than JCom’s 30-Mbps offering. Quintuple the speed for five extra bucks a month.

I found another interesting nugget from one of the presentation decks as well. According to ABI Research, streaming video consumption in North America is not far behind consumption in the Asia-Pacific region today. (See chart below) That’s despite the massive difference in broadband speeds available. Over the next four years, however, ABI projects Asia’s consumption rate to take off, while the growth rate for North America is expected to be a much subtler slope. READ MORE

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The SCTE Cable-Tec Expo officially kicked off this morning with a general session including several high-profile speakers. Since the event is in Comcast’s hometown, both COO Steve Burke and CTO Tony Werner were on hand, as well as top execs from Cox, Charter, HBO, Showtime, Nortel and PBS. Burke laid out some of the changes in the cable industry, including the fact that 40% of cable revenues today come from sources other than video. He expects that number to go over 50% in the next few years.

Also of interest, Burke stated that cable’s top two initiatives right now are Canoe and Clearwire. In other words, advanced advertising and wireless broadband.

Cynthia Brumfield and Jeff Baumgartner also covered the session this morning. See Cynthia’s post on the rate of cable industry change, and Jeff’s post on cable’s WiMAX timeline.

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Internally at Motorola there’s been a lot of discussion around the uptick in cable interest in passive optical networks (PON). There’s plenty of life left in HFC networks, but there are places where fiber-to-the-home, and specifically gigabit PON rollouts make sense. Compton Cable, based in Canada, is deploying GPON to address the commercial services market. It’s Motorola’s first cable customer to move forward with GPON. (See recent Motorola GPON shipments update) It won’t be the last.

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Motorola has a European study due out this week on consumer mindsets around femtocell service. With results from an online survey of 1,800 consumers across six European countries, the final report from the study tracks some obvious and some surprising conclusions. For example, more than three quarters of respondents had never heard of femtocells, which doesn’t come as much of a shock. However, when femtocell technology was explained, more than 40% said they would definitely or probably buy a femtocell-enabled service if offered in the next 12 months.

I spoke with Motorola’s Malcom Lathan last Friday for a quick review of some of the other findings from the femtocell survey. In the six-minute podcast below, Malcolm answers:

• What makes femtocell service attractive to consumers
• Which service providers consumers would like to see femtocell service from
• How femtocell service might be bundled and billed

Click here to play podcast

Click here for PDF femtocell guide

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A couple of savvy folks picked up on my near-throw-away reference earlier this month to the idea of using switched digital video as a tool for transitioning to MPEG-4. The basic concept is that operators could selectively broadcast MPEG-4 programming by offering it on a switched video tier. This would give them the ability to deliver higher-quality video and save bandwidth whenever MPEG-4 receivers (set-tops) were in use. The idea is tantalizing, but also much more complex than a two-sentence explanation suggests.

In digging through John Schlack’s technical paper on the subject, here are some of the details and clarifications I can offer.

The easiest way to make this work from a technical perspective would be to offer a premium service with additional MPEG-4 HD content. Subscribers to the service would get an MPEG-4 set-top and would be the only ones able to tune to switched channels with MPEG-4 programming. MPEG-2 set-top users simply wouldn’t see the channels as options.

Another way to deploy MPEG-4 content on a switched tier would be to implement forced tuning whenever an MPEG-2 subscriber requested a program being delivered with MPEG-4 encoding. With today’s equipment, this would require storing both an MPEG-2 and an MPEG-4 version of the program – not a problem when storage and streaming capacity are set up to be scaled separately. The system would deliver the MPEG-4 version when requested, and would force tune everyone to an MPEG-2 version if any MPEG-2 users requested the content. Force tuning has the potential to be somewhat disruptive, but there are solutions for mitigating that problem, like making sure both versions of a show are on the same QAM and/or waiting for a commercial break to force tune.

Theoretically, there should be no reason operators couldn’t also implement dynamic transcoding. In that instance, the switched digital video (SDV) system would dynamically transition between an MPEG-2 and an MPEG-4 stream, without the need to have two separate versions of a show queued. However, today’s decoders are not capable of dynamic transcoding, which means operators would have to spend money to deploy new decoders.

The end of John Schlack’s paper describes the benefits of using SDV for MPEG-4 delivery so succinctly that I’m going to quote it directly here. Any further questions? Drop me a line at marisilbey (at) comcast dot net.

Initially with a small number of MPEG‑4 capable settop boxes, SDV will be an enabling technology for deploying MPEG‑4 into the cable plant, allowing delivery of additional HD content and potential bandwidth savings. As the number of MPEG‑4 capable settop boxes grows beyond the deployed legacy settop box count, the cable plant will transition to broadcasting more MPEG‑4 content while delivering the MPEG‑2 content on the switched tier. This will provide further bandwidth savings.

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