Monthly Archives: October 2009

A Reader’s Guide to This Week’s Denver Tech-Feast

by Leslie Ellis // October 26 2009

Big doings in Denver this week, especially for the tech-interested. That’s good, because it’s been six months since the last big core dump in cable engineering, and four months since that empty spot, in mid-June, when the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo used to occur.

It’s time for a feast.

If your plans give you a full week in Our Fair City, and you can attend both the CTAM Summit and the SCTE Expo, start on Monday at CTAM with “We Have An App for That! Bringing New Applications to Traditional Devices,” “3D Television: Entering the Third Dimension, Ready or Not?” and “Ringing Toward the Future: Home Phone Market, Technology and Trends.”

Then, don’t miss “Cable’s Consumer Product Agenda,” on Tuesday morning, for the view from an A-list of cable technologists from Bright House Networks (Nomi Bergman), Comcast (Tony Werner),  and Time Warner Cable (Mike LaJoie.)

For those planning to stay through the SCTE Expo, don’t miss the 8:30 opening on Wednesday, October 28. We have it on good authority that the keynote by John Schanz, EVP of Network Engineering & Technical Operations at Comcast, will be a multimedia abundanza of past (SCTE celebrates 40 this year), present, and future.

Plus, the Expo workshop schedule – which doesn’t repeat this year, heads-up – is right on the money of what’s on engineering minds. If you can’t go, here’s a sampling.

Advanced Advertising: If it’s your thing, but you’re not as hip as you’d like to be about  “SaFI” (pronounced as a word that rhymes with “taffy”), check out the “Advanced Advertising: Making it a Reality” session, on Thursday from 8-9:15.

DOCSIS 3.0 and Wideband: Lots to choose from here. Take IPv6, for instance – the new numbering system for Internet-connected devices. To do this in context, take a count, before you leave home, of all the items in your house that take an Internet connection. (Here in the geekosphere, the count is 16.)

Today’s numbering system for Internet-connected devices – Ipv4 – is redlining. IPv6 expands the number of number of IP-connectable devices to a one with 18 zeros behind it, which is roughly analogous to the number of known stars in our universe. That’s good, but the transition to IPv6 isn’t without challenges.

The SCTE workshop motherlode also hits on how to write applications for EBIF and tru2way; how to engineer for video over IP and “TV everywhere;” how to measure the impact of IP video on capacity planning, and how to get wideband and channel bonding going in the upstream. Aaaaah, details.

For dessert? Make your way toward Golden Gate Canyon, 30 miles west of town. It’s a quick getaway into some Rocky Mountain scenery that will assuredly blunt the stress of such a jam-packed week.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

IPTV and Bandwidth

by Leslie Ellis // October 19 2009

We’ll take a break from the lingo of IPTV this week in favor of a more fundamental question: How much bandwidth does it take to send linear and on-demand video over IP?

The short answer: Less. Less than it takes to deliver “traditional” digital TV streams, anyway. Why? Three reasons.

Reason #1: If you’re prepping for video over IP (meaning video over the path now used by cable modems), you might as well do advanced compression. The two move in lockstep.

Advanced compression – variously called MPEG-4, AVC and H.264 – makes it possible to squish two to three times more HD streams into the same channel size (6 MHz, or, the equivalent of around 40 Mbps.)

To put that in perspective, today’s compression – MPEG-2 – slims standard definition (SD) TV streams to 3.75 Mbps, and HD streams to around 15 Mbps.

By contrast, MPEG-4 skinnies SD streams down to 1 Mbps or less, and HD streams as low as 4 Mbps. (This is highly dependent on screen size.)

In bandwidth costs, that’s a big savings right there.

Reason #2: IP video – at least the on-demand stuff – will be switched. Switching is a bandwidth efficiency method all by itself.

Reason #3: The built-in statistical gains that come with moving video packets through wider packaging. What wider packaging? The bonded, or “wideband” channels, that come with the DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem specification.

Statmux refresher: If compression squeezes video streams to their smallest state, statistical multiplexing hyper-organizes those compressed bits, for the ride to homes.

Right now, in “traditional” digital video, statmuxing organizes multiple video streams more efficiently, inside one 6 MHz channel. In a four-channel wideband bond, though, the statmux gets to work across 24 MHz. The extra elbow room, space-wise, translates into more little gaps that can be filled with video packets.

The supplier community, and especially those who sell the gear that will enable video over IP – meaning Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS) and in-home gear – says that moving video over IP can save as much as 40% in bandwidth, compared to traditional means. (They have a dog in this hunt, of course.)

This conversation typically veers into talk of variable bit rate encoding vs. adaptive streaming. More on that another time.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Meet the New Guide — the RUI

by Leslie Ellis // October 12 2009

Call it what you will – cross-platform, multi-screen, IPTV – serving video to more screens than the TV continues to pop new language into the landscape.

Let’s take “RUI” as this week’s example. It stands for “Remote User Interface.” It matters to how people find video when they’re not watching TV. In short: The guide for the other screens.

Other screens means PCs, laptops, and any in the growing pile of other, smaller gadgets that are video-capable.

The story of “the guide” in cable is thick with history, shenanigans, and lawsuits. Because it’s the first screen consumers see, in most cases, it’s a bellwether of brand. Everybody wants to be the first “touch point” with consumers.

A guide for linear TV typically contains three major pieces. There’s the guide data – what shows are on what channel, at what time — and who owns that information.

Then there’s the stuffing of that guide data into the guide framework (the grids). In the early days of digital video, most set-tops contained barely enough memory to store more than a couple days worth. This was back when people actually saved the printed guide insert in the Sunday paper, or subscribed to print weeklies. (Remember TVGuide?)

And there’s the guide itself, always with the X on its back. Scrolling grids, static grids, remote control buttons. The one constant in electronic program guides is the opinion motherlode about its blemishes.

If you’re a cable operator laying the framework for video services that show up on an assortment of screens, your technologists are probably already up to their elbows in the navigational part of the transition. The guide; the “UI.”

At issue is how to present a consistent “look and feel” to a range of display devices, each of which may have different screen resolutions and bandwidth capabilities. That’s where the “remote” part comes in – and its cousin, “the cloud.”

The thinking: Rather than pushing a guide and its data onto a screen that may not have the firepower to deal with it, why not put the navigation elsewhere in the network (in “the cloud”)? Bring up the guide from somewhere else (preferably so quickly that consumers don’t think twice about it).

In tech lingo, this discussion teems with phrasing like “DLNA with CEA 2014,” HTML 5.0, Silverlight (Microsoft’s version), and Adobe Flash. Sometimes you’ll hear talk of “X.11 on steroids,” to mean a way of painting a pixel-accurate representation of a screen on another screen.

That’s the set-up of the RUI. This is all in early brew stage.  We’ll keep you tuned.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

The Gateway — It’s Baaaaack!

by Leslie Ellis // October 05 2009

Maybe this could’ve been predicted: The “gateway” is back. It’s one of those heavily-prefixed terms that almost never seems to stand on its own seven letters.

The last time “gateway” was in vogue – in the ‘02 timeframe — press releases bulged with phrasing like “robust residential gateway,” or just plain “data gateway.”

A refuge of vagueness, Will Strunk would’ve harrumphed onto “gateway.”

A “gateway” is a thing that allows or controls access into other things: A computer to another computer, a network to another network.

As cable providers evolve their networks for linear and on-demand TV services over IP (Internet Protocol), so will the “gateway” re-emerge to bridge between MPEG transport (set-top path) and IP transport (cable modem path).

Put another way, watch for the gateway to be an elixir for the “any device” part of “TV Everywhere.”

Here’s how to shake down a gateway for specificity. Say you’re wandering around the upcoming SCTE Cable Tec Expo. You spy a box. Maybe it looks like a set-top; maybe it looks like a cable modem. You’re told it’s a “gateway.”

First, ask about the bill of materials. What’s in it? If you hear “tuners,” ask: MPEG or DOCSIS?

If the latter, ask how many. The number of DOCSIS tuners indicates the number of channels that can be bonded into a nice shelf for IP video services.

If you hear “MPEG,” the box includes a hedge – “legacy video” tuners, just in case it needs to revert into a set-top box.

The business philosophy for the gateway is plausible. More and more homes have multiple HDTVs. A high-end screen warrants a high-end set-top; dual-tuner HD-DVRs run in the $400 range. So, a home with three HDTVs rings up $1,200 in boxes.

Instead, maybe there’s one mambo-gateway, feeding two smaller, $100-ish IP boxes, for the two other HDTVs. Shave $400 or so off the total cost of CPE, per house.

All of this beelines to the next big topic in this evolution: The “remote user interface,” or “RUI.” More on that next time.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.