Monthly Archives: November 2010

EBIF and iPad, Sitting in a Tree…

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.

Getting to Know DPoE

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.

It’s Partner-Up Time Again

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.

Jottings from SCTE Cable-Tec Expo

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.