Yearly Archives: 2010

by Leslie Ellis // December 20 2010

Five days ‘til Christmas, 12 days ‘til a new year, 18 days ‘til the Consumer Electronics Show. No wonder this year’s techie wish lists are so …. long, and informed.

In our sometimes-annual query of the technical community, to see what they seek to give or get, one thing came up over and over: Tablets. Not just any tablet, though. Bob Zitter, CTO of HBO (among several others) wants an iPad that will play Flash video; Pragash Pillai, CTO of Bresnan Communications, looks forward to an Android-based tablet, “since my iPad does not support Flash.”

Both Mike Hayashi, EVP of Advanced Engineering for Time Warner, and Alexander Brock, VP/Emerging Technologies and Innovation for Rogers Communications, are hot on the “GoPro” line of HD cameras. Hayashi, because “it attaches to your helmet, your dog’s collar, or your own head … especially good if you take a major spill and break something;” Brock prefers the “Hero 960” helmet version, because “if you know what it is, you know you want one.”

Also on Brock’s 21-item list: A 320 MB PlayStation3, loaded with Gran Turismo 5 and a Logitech Momo-force steering wheel, “because one, in HD it can make you sick, and two, it’s as close as one can get to Nurburgring without actually being there.”

Interactive TV architect Christy Martin seeks two domestic gadgets: A SousVide Supreme Water Oven: “It vacuum seals meats and cooks them to a perfect pinkness throughout – juicy, and no grey ring on the outside.”

Also on Martin’s list: The FEIN MultiMaster: “A must-have tool for any serious remodeler – it lets you saw, grind, sand, cut off pipes, and handle all those other annoying, real-world situations they never talk about on the do-it-yourself shows.”

Gadget aficionado Bill Sheppard, Chief Digital Media Officer for Oracle, is on the prowl for a network-connected Blu-Ray player. “I’d recommend getting one with DLNA support, to take advantage of forthcoming tru2way DLNA bridging.” (Translation: It’ll hook up to your other DLNA stuff, so you can watch movies on other screens than the one attached to the player.)

As for practicality, this from CableLabs director of business services and Colorado outdoorsman Glenn Russell: “The rule of the backcountry is to treat your feet right, and never get separated from your lunch.” His list ranges from high-end socks and telemark gear, to “a That 70s Show t-shirt.”

If only we could all find this handy elixir under the tree: “A common sense pill for management,” sent in by “Anonymous, in Management.” We’ll take a case, please….

Merry everything to all of you, from all of us!

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

by Leslie Ellis // December 13 2010

In cable, December is typically a tech-heavy month – until 2003, because of the Western Show, sandwiched in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. More recently, because of the gadget bonanza that is the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

A brief walk through Tech Decembers past: Way back when (December 1, 1977), the pioneering interactive TV project known as QUBE launched. Three Decembers later, Zenith took the wraps off of a programmable VCR. (List price: $1,350.)

Microsoft announced its “Insight Architect” program – its first foray into interactive TV – in December of ‘94. Also that month: AT&T, IBM, Northern Telecom and H-P all announced their plans to make set-top boxes for cable. (None ever really materialized.)

The CableLabs specifications that begat the DOCSIS cable modem were unveiled in December of ’96. (Note: This means that cable broadband turns 15 in 2011.)

This week in 2001, technologists at AT&T Broadband and Cox were pulling all-nighters, orchestrating a frenetic, seven-day cutover from the Excite@Home broadband effort – perhaps the industry’s most fiery collapse.

Here’s a short list of what appear to be the most plausible tech trendlines for 2011:

Cable over IP, or whatever we’re going to call the notion of sending a managed video service over those broadband pipes. (“IPTV” sounds too AT&T, we’re told; “Advanced Digital Cable” is making rounds.) Despite the lack of a good descriptor, the body of work is critically important to compete with the growing list of over-the-top video alternatives.

Deals, deals, deals. Call it a widget, soft client, cable button – it’s the thing that pops up on the Internet-connected TV, after you buy it and hang it on the wall. Picture it as the MSO-branded button sitting next to the Netflix button. Getting there means cutting deals with consumer electronics makers. Samsung and Panasonic are safe bets, given their cable partnership histories.

Freight fights. The scuffle between Comcast, Level 3 and, ultimately, the bulge of Netflix bits clogging the industry’s broadband pipes will intensify next year, as the video business shifts toward devices that have video capabilities and an IP connection.

Web services, to outfit, say, the deployed base of OCAP (OpenCable Applications Platform) set-top middleware, to do IP video.

Expressed interfaces, another term in the  “web services” lingo that means opening up key back office components to IP-based techniques. It matters for economically speed the deployment of new services and apps.

All of it will almost certainly provide a heaping plate of jargon and gibberish. We’ll keep the light on it for you.

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

by Leslie Ellis // December 06 2010

Three things are clear about video, in this last month of 2010.

One, it’s morphing from a service, into an app.

Two, it’s gigantic, size-wise, when compared to regular web surfing and phone calls.

Three, the “over-the-top” iteration of it represents 15 to 50% of traffic running over cable’s broadband plant – up from about 10 percent, two or three years ago.

The people whose work it is to manage Internet bandwidth used to freak out about peer-to-peer video. P2P isn’t exactly chump change, currently, but streaming video is definitely the bigger ogre.

Over-the-top, under-the-bottom, call it what you will:  Practically and tactically, it’s a bit tsunami, clogging a network someone else built. It rides “over the top” of the broadband infrastructure built not just by cable, but by wireless, telco, anything that moves Internet bits.

From that network-centric point of view, it’s fairly easy to agree on one thing: “Holiday punch” takes on a whole new meaning when you’re the guy handing in a budget request for doubled or quadrupled capital spending next year, just to make sure your CMTS ports don’t buckle under the extra load of over-the-top video traffic. (Oh, and don’t forget the part about the no return on investment!)

Think of it this way. When a highway gets consistently clogged with cars, two options exist: Add a lane, or carpool.

In cable, “add a lane” becomes “plunk another DOCSIS channel into the bond,” which presupposes DOCSIS 3.0.

The carpool equivalent is to lessen the number of cars sharing the road. In cable tech terms, that means splitting the node –  lighting up another strand of fiber, so the available bandwidth is used by half the number of homes.

Here’s why the analogy breaks down, though, when it comes to over-the-top video: Adaptive streaming. It makes over-the-top video behave like a gas, filling all available space. Doesn’t matter how much room there is, it’ll find a way through.

More bandwidth? Great! Higher resolution stream.  Less bandwidth? No problem. Lower resolution stream. And so on, in real time.

Again: Streaming video, as a percentage of over-the-top Internet traffic, grew from 10% to as high as 50%, in three years. And Netflix streaming is just getting started.

This is why the whole hullaballoo between Level3 and Comcast, and related to the surge in streaming Netflix traffic, is so necessary. Ugly, but necessary. It’s a question of who pays what freight.

Sure, I love free shipping. Who doesn’t? The merchants I buy stuff from often offer it as a perk. But I don’t expect it 100% of the time.

Man up, Netflix.

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

by Leslie Ellis // November 20 2010

Back in May, when Comcast CEO Brian Roberts first demonstrated the use of an iPad as a set-top remote, he thanked “the magic of EBIF” for making it possible. (Recall that the iPad had only hit the market a month prior.)

Huh? How on earth does something as clunky-sounding as EBIF (Enhanced Binary Interchange Format) make magic with the rock star gadget that is the iPad?

Perhaps the best way to translate this is to learn from my mistake.  At home last week, I loaded the app onto Doug’s iPad. He couldn’t remember his XFinity login and password, which is a critical part of the process. No problem, we can use mine from work, I offered.

Bingo. The guide was on the iPad. Changing channels involves tapping a network’s logo icon, or tapping the show title and “watch now.” An animated antenna appears at the top of the iPad, implying that it’s spraying signal at your set-top, to tune the channel.

I fiddled around with it, picking networks, picking shows, tap tap, watch now. The little antenna icon did its signal-squirting animation.

Nothing. I made extra sure I was pointing it right at the set-top, yet the TV stayed stubbornly parked on channel.

It took a few minutes before I realized that I was sitting at home, changing the channels on the set-top at the office.  

Okay, okay. Stop laughing.

What happened? Let’s look at the signaling of it. You pick a channel from the iPad. That selection is not sprayed out the front of the iPad to the set-top, but instead through the iPad’s Internet connection, to Comcast’s servers. From your login, it knows you’re you, and that at your billing address, you have x-number of qualified set-tops.

So it sends back an EBIF trigger instructing your box to change channels. Inside the box, the EBIF user agent sees and executes the command.

Pretty snappy, really, despite my botched login workaround.

Note to Comcast: About that security feature that asks you to enter the two squiggly words, to prove you’re a human, not a machine? It would probably work better, and aggravate fewer customers, if you didn’t use gibberish words expressed in Klingon…

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

by Leslie Ellis // November 15 2010

This week’s translation dips into the terminology of cable-provided services to businesses – a wonky pedigree of tech talk, but important as the Next Big Thing to attract revenue.

We’ll start with “DPoE,” a double-nested acronym that stands for “DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON.” Some pronounce it as a word, like “depot,” others as its constituent letters.

DOCSIS means through the cable modem side of the plant. EPON stands for Ethernet Passive Optical Networks, tech-speak for running Ethernet over a length of fiber attached directly to a business.

Right now, cable isn’t as active in providing EPON connectivity as it could be. (Bright House Networks is the exception.)

Yet, EPON is big business. It’s what more and more commercial accounts want to use for their fast, broadband connections. That’s “fast” as in 1 Gbps, which is the same as 1000 Mbps. (For context, even the fastest residential broadband connections top out at around 50 Mbps.)

Know going in that DPoE is less about the pipe, and more about the process. Meaning, it’s not concerned with the bandwidth of delivering 1 Gbps so much as automating the back office components to serve it.  It’s a provisioning thing, intended to quickly and affordably set up new business customers with high-speed links, over fiber.

DPoE didn’t start out with an automation concentration, though. As the story goes, a bunch of engineers were working with the EPON vendor community, which had agreed to make their stuff interoperable with each other – that vendor A’s “OLT” (Optical Line Terminal) would work with vendor B, C, D or E’s “ONU” (optical network unit, and the thing that sits at the customer site.)

Despite good intentions, the gear wasn’t interoperating. Further investigation revealed problems in what cable people call “the back office,” and telco people call “OAM” – for “operations, administration and maintenance.”

And that’s what lit up the “why re-invent the wheel” lightbulb. DOCSIS already contains ways to automatically provision for such “OAM”-ish checklist items, they reckoned. (Advanced class: Things like DNS, DHCP, TFTP and SNMP.)

In essence, and in a huge oversimplification, DPoE spoofs the DOCSIS back office components into thinking that an EPON OLT is a CMTS, and that an EPON ONU is a cable modem. It translates between the EPON system and the DOCSIS provisioning.

What it means is that in the near future (2011, by most estimates), cable providers can add EPON technologies to support their suite of products for businesses. That’s a good thing for ka-ching.

There is a catch: DPoE assumes there’s fiber connected to EPON-interested businesses. That’s often not the case. Still, it shows every sign of big-revenue potential for the growth of cable-delivered commercial services.

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

by Leslie Ellis // November 08 2010

By the looks of last week’s news noise around online video, it’s partner-up time again!

Walmart, owner of Vudu (which streams movies in 1080p) hitched up with Disney to stunt a free, electronic copy of Toy Story 3, with Blu-Ray disc purchase. (More deal talk: Vudu’s player recently became a Boxee feature.)

Yamaha added Netflix, Blockbuster and YouTube to the feature list of its new Blu-Ray player. Amazon streaming is on Panasonic’s Blu-Ray players. LG players sport Cinema Now (under Best Buy’s tattered wing) and Vudu.

Consider this CES foreshadowing. A big part of the buzz of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show is likely to be about whose video player / online movie library / Internet doohickey is in whose Blu-Ray player, game console, or HDTV.

And then there’s the surge of the online movie vendors. Amazon upped its title count to 10,000 titles last week from 300, via its deal with Disc+. (Buy a DVD, get an electronic copy.)

Netflix grew its subscriber count to 16.9 million, a 52% leap from last year. (Engineering banter at the recent SCTE Cable-Tec Expo put Netflix streaming traffic at 15% — and skyrocketing.)

And then there’s the Ultraviolet camp, with its everybody-but-Apple-and-Disney digital locker service. Intent: For people to trust that when they buy an invisible copy of something, it’s as easy to use as the DVD version.

In cable, these conversations tend to beeline toward hierarchical storage and “content delivery networks,” or CDNs. It’s the new black. Everybody either built one, is building one, or is renting.

The thinking goes like this: If you’re the guy offering on-demand services over the VOD network you built, across all of your systems, over the last dozen or so years, you may have 100 or more different storage servers scattered about, all holding pretty much the same stuff.

Why not centralize that, and leave those 100 end points as caches for more popular content? Put the popular stuff – the “hot content,” in CDN-speak – out in the caches. Leave the cold content on the big, centralized library servers.

Simple, right? On the surface, maybe. Underneath, though, there’s a lot of engineering and architecting going on. First of all, what’s being stored? Is there an encoder needed at the front, to chop each title into smaller, 2-second chunks? Yes or no on storing three separate versions, in high, medium and low resolutions, to suit available bandwidth?

Caches also work to reduce network load, but that depends on how quickly usage patterns shift. (Turns out it’s a lot.)

Figuring out how to know when something’s about to fail is a design biggie. And, if the title is coming out of cold storage, what’s the best way to handle trick-play features, like fast forward, pause, and rewind?

Cable, arguably the biggest server-upper of on-demand titles, is hard at work on all of this. All that’s missing are those big-name, partner-up headlines. Well, beyond the obvious…

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

by Leslie Ellis // November 01 2010

TV becomes an app, headends become “data centers,” VOD storage gets hierarchical. Conditional access meets digital rights management, set-tops morph into gateways, “soft clients” become the way to get the TV app onto non-traditional screens.

That’s a sampling of notes from the recent SCTE Cable Tec-Expo, in New Orleans, where engineers gathered to figure out how to build all the stuff that’s coming.

Let’s start with the “soft client” – the thing you’ll click to get to your TV subscription or on-demand title from your other screens (tablets, smartphones, laptops.) All together, North American cable operators buy something like 10 million digital set-tops per year. Portable screens, laptops, and tablets could easily enter homes at two or three times that rate.

Hence the need for a “soft” set-top. Conversationally, it goes like this: “Where’s your API (Application Program Interface)? I’ll build a button!”

In the on-demand world, it’s hard to go two sentences in without bumping into “CDNs” (content delivery networks). Once the exclusive bastion of companies like Akamai as a way to move and keep popular stuff closest to users, cable operators are rapidly building their own vats of hierarchical storage. A few big, centralized “library servers,” feeding the most popular content out to local VOD servers.

Big changes ahead for the headend, too. For the past two decades, they’ve been consolidating, mostly because of advancements in optical techniques to blast signals 50 miles or farther.

Now, and as characterized in the spookily titled “Death of the Headend: How IP Will Transform Cable Services,” presented by Cisco Systems’ Dave Brown, racks of servers make up the scene; “web services” provide easier links into legacy back office systems.

But I’m guessing at least one vestige will remain, though – those phones with the really, really long cords, so as to reach the farthest rack when troubleshooting.

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

by Leslie Ellis // October 25 2010

The good news about producing TV content in 3D: Adding depth to nature programming, live sports and computerized games works especially well. The bad news: No matter the genre, it’s way more expensive than shooting in 2D.

That was the word from last week’s CTAM Summit, where production-side executives from ESPN, 3DNet and Flight 33 Productions talked candidly about how 3D advances storytelling.

Session highlights on shooting sports in 3D: Golf, the X-Games, and other sports played on topographically diverse surfaces shows off 3D better than flat-field sports, like basketball, football and hockey.

A second set of commentators is required to call games produced in 3D. Because the universe of 3DTV owners is still pretty small, the announcers often add in commentary about how the game is being produced.

Hard: Dealing with glitches on live events that wouldn’t matter at all in 2D. Like when a shot is set for 50 feet, and a cheerleader suddenly jumps into the frame from 10 feet away. Likewise for quick swipes from one side of the field to another – slower is better, to give the brain and eyes time to interpolate the depth on the screen.

Non-sports 3D highlights: Creating content about abandoned places – a small town inside Chernobyl, as part of Flight 33’s work on “Life After People,” was cited as one example – works especially well in 3D. Long shots, common in nature and history programming, don’t show well in 3D.

In all cases, producing in 3D is still way more expensive than shooting in 2D, because of the additional set-up, cameras, and gear required.

What about converting existing 2D content into 3D? Doing it right can cost as much as $125,000 per minute; doing it wrong can permanently damage the perception of a film (“Clash of the Titans” routinely finds itself in this category.)

None of these challenges dampened the enthusiasm about making content in 3D, however – comments like “all of your senses light up” and “it’s like you’re there” regularly seasoned the conversation.

All, though, lamented the lack of 3D content – a reality that depends on consumer uptake of 3D sets. It’s a classic conundrum: Why produce 3DTV content if no one has a TV that can display it; why build 3DTVs, if there’s nothing to watch.

The holiday season arrives in about 60 days. That will almost certainly shed light on how consumers view the 3DTV equation. Until then – Happy Halloween!

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

by Leslie Ellis // October 18 2010

Going into any trade show, there’s what you want to find out, and what you know you’ll hear about.

This week’s double-feature – CTAM Summit, overlapped by the SCTE Cable Tec-Expo – contains tons of both.

What you know you’ll hear about: 3DTV. The volume remains cranked up on this latest consumer electronics thrust to emulate the home run that was HDTV.

If you feel like you’ve heard it all, stop in on “How 3D Sharpens Stories and Brands,” at CTAM Summit, Tuesday at 10:30. It’s a different take on the topic, told by people who are making 3DTV happen on the production side: ESPN, Discovery Communications, and Flight 33 Productions.

Other things you know you’ll hear about: DOCSIS 3.0, which remains a tech darling at the SCTE Expo. The big focus this season: What it takes to do upstream channel bonding, to make room for all that video-conferencing we’re going to be doing from our TVs and home PCs.

A quick sampling of other jumbo-sized jargon that will season the engineers’ annual confab: “Representational State Transfer,” “opaque origin servers,” and one I had to look up, “idempotent.” All have to do with content delivery networks, or CDNs – the ways operators are building hierarchical VOD storage for titles sent over national, regional and local optical networks.

(“Idempotent” is a math term, loosely meaning that the outcome doesn’t change, no matter how much you change the inputs. I’m no mathematician, but the term nonetheless reminds me of Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.)

Here’s what I want to find out at this week’s marketing-then-engineering fest: What will it take for Consumer Jane to bring home her brand new Internet-connected whatever (HDTV, tablet, laptop), turn it on, and have at the ready a way to download the navigational app from her local cable operator. Netflix is fine, but, more from the home team, please.

Here’s what else: Is it just me, or do all these “connected device” and “over-the-top” entrants lack a way to just leave the video on in the background? Say Consumer Jane likes to park the big screen on Food Network when she’s cooking. Do her shows keep running, unattended, like linear? Or does she have to click for the next title every time?

If the latter: Hello IP simulcast, or, replicating the linear lineup yet again, this time to move over the broadband plant. Takes a lot of bandwidth (six to eight 6 MHz channels, say the back-of-the-envelope calculations), but, it usually works to be the guy who has what the other guys don’t.

One more thing I seek: An alternate way of describing the everything-ness that is IP video. Please. I’m begging. It is the most awkward spoken acronym ever.

All of this, plus cloud computing, commercial/business services, and an IP video cornucopia, will be the jargon darlings of this week’s trade show mashup in New Orleans. See you there!

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

by Leslie Ellis // October 11 2010

I’m not big on predictions, but one thing really does seem clear: Very shortly, we will all have the option, probably within arm’s reach, of talking on the phone while seeing each other.

Think about it: More and more PC monitors and laptops come with a built-in webcam. More and more smart phones come with cameras on the front.

Chances are high that even your mother has heard about, and probably used, Skype.

Then, last week, Cisco introduced a residential version of its “tele-presence” line, called “Umi” (pronounced “you me”). If you’ve seen the enterprise version, you know that it’s freakishly high in video quality. (As in, forget about multi-tasking during that long video conference call.)

Putting aside the matter of whether we really want to see each other every time we talk on the phone, there’s another consideration: Upstream bandwidth.

A brief refresher: Cable bandwidth is segmented into two chunks: Upstream and downstream. So far, the big work in bandwidth optimization is far more focused on the downstream path (toward homes) than the upstream (from homes.)

This makes sense, especially when you consider how many different ways operators need to carry the same networks. ESPN, for instance, might be carried in analog, standard definition digital, and high definition. It’s entirely likely that mainstream networks will be carried linearly in IP, too. So that’s each big network, potentially being carried four ways.

The good news is, optimizing downstream bandwidth is comfortably provisioned with options. These days, operators needing more shelf space (name me one that isn’t) respond by harvesting analog channels, recycling bandwidth using digital video switches, or building more bandwidth on the top (1 GHz.)

No such panoply of options exists for the upstream path, which represents about five percent of total available bandwidth. It’s completely hemmed in between 5-42 MHz.

This upstream squeeze issue isn’t new. Twenty years ago, a lot of the engine room talk was about building a second upstream path, way up high, around 1 GHz.

Today, the options to optimize the upstream are still pretty much the same as they were in the early ‘90s: Figure out a better modulation scheme that can survive down there (it’s noisy in the 5-42), move the spectral boundary above 42 MHz, or build a second path.

And with all these gadgets coming that let us see each other from far away, it’s probably time to dust off the options and try again.

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