NCTA

LOS ANGELES–This year’s Imagine Park program — a live TV “show within The Cable Show,” now in its fourth year, and designed to shine the light on the hot tickets in cable and broadband technology — served up plenty of sizzle, but a few rose to the top of the list.

Starting with FanTV, a new entrant in hardware-based video streamers, and by far the most attractive and uniquely designed in the category. (Especially now that the original and very funky Boxee Box is officially “tele-vestigial.” Meaning no longer on the market. Sigh. A nod to its out-of-the-box box design!)

FanTV is hands-down gorgeous — swoopy and elegant, with a buttonless remote that fits in the palm of the hand like a smooth rock, and perches magnetically on top of the player like some kind of electronic cairn.

Its intent, market-tested with Cox last year and now scheduled to enter Time Warner Cable’s footprint, is to provide subscription and over-the-top video to broadband-only consumers. If you live in a Time Warner Cable market, run-don’t-walk to get one when it hits the (retail) market this summer.

Also a gift to the category of television: “Dolby Vision,” an effort by the stalwarts in sound to make high definition video brighter, for lack of a visual term.

The set-up: When we think of HD, we think of higher resolution — more pixels. Dolby’s position is that two other dimensions can be manipulated to enhance television, beyond additional pixels: Better pixels, and faster pixels. It’s all about improved color gamut (blacker blacks, greener greens) and higher dynamic range. Watch for it to enter the market next year, as it gets licensed by CE and screen manufacturers.

My favorite Imagine Park session this year, even though it hadn’t happened yet at press time: A showcase of innovation coming out of the developmental labs inside Comcast, Liberty Global and Time Warner Cable.

For starters is the fact that these “lab weeks” even exist. All involved MSOs sponsor the activities as a way to let their developers stretch their wings, design-wise, then “pitch” their ideas, internally and throughout the year.

It’s part one of a broader body of work, known as “DevOps,” which blends people from product development and operations. It’s happening as a way to get new services out more quickly, by removing the friction that traditionally hamstrings those two groups.

Here’s a partial list of what was scheduled to happen in the Lab Week session: A tablet mosaic that links related, web-sourced content to subscription video; cloud-based services on legacy boxes; and a way to take your home phone service with you, internationally, on your mobile.

One other bit of extraordinarily good news coming out of this year’s Cable Show: The NCTA’s annual compilation of tech papers will be available online.  (Go here: www.nctatechnicalpapers.com) Not just this year’s batch — all of them. And they go back for decades. Halleluiah!

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

As promised: More tasty tech nuggets from this year’s compilation of Technical Forum papers, selected and aggregated by the National Cable Television Association and the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers (SCTE).

Starting with what it took for Cablevision Systems to build a network-based DVR service. Sure, everybody talks cloud DVR now, but Cablevision was first to market, arrows and all. How it all came to be, and what it took, is compiled in a paper simply titled “Remote Storage DVR,” by Stephanie Mitchko, SVP of Video Infrastructure Software.

A term you’ll learn: “COTS,” which stands for “Commercial Off-the-Shelf.” As in servers. Putting video “in the cloud” requires lots (and lots) of them.

Surprise, surprise: People record more than they watch. If you’re into a graphical representation, Mitchko includes two charts showing daily volume of both recordings and streaming activities.

This year’s collection is heavy on the SDN – Software Defined Network. It’s a cloud thing, and not the easiest concept to comprehend. Which makes this explanation, from Cisco’s David Lively, particularly handy: “The general definition of cloud is resources, abstracted from the physical hardware, delivered elastically and on demand.”

Because of that, Lively continues (in a paper titled “Software Defined Networking and Cloud – Enabling Greater Flexibility for Cable Operators”), applications can be deployed and scaled without having to physically configure and deploy new hardware.

And because of that, network devices can be outfitted with “programmatic interfaces to define network behavior, utilizing business intelligence and policies.”

I try not to miss anything written by cable modem oracle Gerry White, Chief Architect of Network Infrastructure for Arris. This year’s Gerry-paper (“Can DOCSIS Networks Leverage SDN?”) is a little jarring, because of what it means to people and plant (goodbye, headend!), but such is life.

“In this architecture, the headend in its current form can be replaced by a data center, an Ethernet distribution hub and a simple node,” White writes in his assessment of what it would take to move parts of the cable modem specification out of hardware and into a software-defined network.

Comcast Labs figured out a way to predict the popularity of TV programs, by algorithmically combining DVR scheduling data (gleaned from its xfinity app), social media and historical Nielsen data.

In “What’s Hot: Linear Popularity Prediction from TV and Social Usage Data,” authors Jan Neumann, Xiaodong Yu and Mohamad Ali Torkamani detail how they popped the predictive capabilities of top-10 programming by 4 percent, over Nielsen-only methods.

Plus they drop this keeper of a quirky phrase: “In the end, we got the best results using shallow random forest regression trees.” (As opposed to deep deliberate desert progression flowers.)

We’ll spare you a Part 3. But as tech paper compilations go, excellent haul this year!

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

At the 2008 Cable Show, I interview five participants in the CableLabs “CableNet” exhibit area. Up first: Samsung’s Steve Goldstein, who demonstrates the latest in 3DTV.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

At the 2008 Cable Show, I interview five participants in the CableLabs CableNET exhibit area. This segment features Jim Turner (2:40), VP of Synacor, on the use of DVR-like controls on Charter.net’s web site.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

At the 2008 Cable Show, I interview five participants in the CableLabs CableNET exhibit area. This segment features Hans Pang, of Ruckus Wireless, explaining the company’s smart antenna array that allows multiple streams to run wirelessly.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

At the 2008 Cable Show, I interview five participants in the CableLabs CableNET exhibit area. This segment features EchoStar Technologies’ Michael Hockey, discussing a Slingbox with built-in DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem. Intent: To allow subscribers to access subscription video channels on laptops, cell phones, or other mobile devices.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

At the 2008 Cable Show, I interview five participants in the CableLabs CableNET exhibit area. This segment features David Nicholas, with Symmetricom (later Cheetah Technologies), who explains software that automatically measures the quality of an HD video signal — without the use of human “golden eyes.”

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

This 2007 Cable Show discussion with Comcast CTO Tony Werner concludes with a discussion of the company’s voice product, the benefits of DOCSIS 3.0, and what products Tony hopes to see on the trade show floor.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

Leading into the 2007 Cable Show, I sat down with Tony Werner, CTO of Comcast, to discuss some of the hot issues of the time: Switched digital video, HDTV, and OCAP.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

At the 2006 National Show, I interviewed CableLabs executives Mike Schwartz and Don Dulchinos about that year’s CableNet exhibit highlights. Hot tickets: OCAP-enabled boxes, OCAP apps (not just the guide, new stuff too!); Downloadable conditional access (remember DCAS?); ETV & ITV.

Video courtesy The Cable Channel.