RDK

Amid the lingo of open source software is a new-ish entrant: The Linaro Foundation, which dropped an intersection with cable in the May 29 formation of the “Linaro Digital Home Group,” abbreviated “LHG.”

What’s it all about? On the surface, it’s a way for chip makers, set-top/gateway manufacturers and service providers to manage the complexities involved with moving from one type of silicon chip architecture (“MIPS”), to another (“ARM”).

In at the get-go are Cisco Systems, Comcast, and STMicroelectronics (all active members of the RDK [Reference Design Kit]), as well as Allwinner, ARM, Fujitsu, and HiSilicon.

Lots of moving parts here, starting with why the shift to ARM-based silicon in the first place. Answer: Lower power, higher speeds, smaller form factors. Mobile devices use ARM-based chips, for instance; in-home devices like set-tops and gateways are likely next.

And yes, MIPs v. ARM is a religious architectural debate — not unlike Microsoft v. Apple, in the operating system battles of yore, and Apple v. Android, in today’s techno-landscape. “Going ARM,” for companies accustomed to building MIPs-based silicon (like Broadcom Corp., as one example) usually starts with at least one outburst of “over my dead body!”

What Linaro brings, in general, is “the rest of the story,” from a Linux perspective. Building software products isn’t just writing code — there are points in time where an actual build is required. A “compile.” Important in the lingo of software builds are “active users” — how many people are throwing code into how many “build slaves” in which “build farms.”

Part of every software build involves the best way to ingest what is a usually a torrent of code chunks, coming from all over the place. Thousands of drops, daily. Linaro, in general, manages the Linux distribution of software components for ARM; LHG will extend that into cable-oriented devices.

But wait, there’s more! The Yocto Project, which generally comes up in Linaro conversations as the open source tools software developers use to participate.

In a nutshell: LHG aims to steer the industry further into open source software, and specifically the software related to ARM-based chips, so that the industry can build in-home gear that runs cooler, faster and smaller. Yocto provides the development tools to get there. Off we go…

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

Once you’ve encountered (yet another) cause to become conversant in the language of software, and particularly “agile” development, soon enough you’ll bump into this companion term: “DevOps.”

“DevOps” is an industrial sniglet — a pairing of “Development,” as in product development, and “Operations,” as in keeping the whole operation up and running, at all times.

People who work in product development get rewarded when existing products are improved, and when new products get to market swiftly.

People who work in operations get rewarded when everything just keeps working.

No wonder: Prior to “DevOps,” product development people viewed operations people as barriers to progress, and operations people viewed development people as pesky rogues, always armed with a swell new way to brick the network.

“DevOps” is part cultural spasm, part management renaissance. It’s a movement, usually growing out of an earlier decision to “go agile.” The point of it is to make sure the people who are building the machine, actually use the machine — and to give the people who maintain the machine a say in how it’s designed. Continuously.

When people explain DevOps, they say “over the wall” a lot. A product spec gets tossed “over the wall” to operations, which vets it for deployability, then throws it back over the wall to its developers, to fix this or that.

DevOps removes the wall. It does so by building intangibles into product design: Is it deployable? Does it scale? Can operations do it? It’s all about empowering people to get things done, by removing what can be layers of processes — permissions, approvals, and “adminis-trivia.”

Companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable already began shifting to a DevOps model, tearing apart and re-assembling leads in both categories to (literally) work together.

And because DevOps works in tandem with “agile” software development, it follows that in cable conversations, the RDK (Reference Design Kit) is usually somewhere nearby.

RDK, now a company and a thing, aims to make it faster and easier for cable providers to launch the kinds of IP-based, in-home hardware that, in turn, makes it faster and easier to launch new, cloud-based services. It’s what’s inside of Comcast’s X1 platform.

Ultimately, DevOps recognizes that the opposing forces of change and stability are both vital to a company’s success. Its reach is wide, and it’s probably headed your way. Best get limbered up.

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

“User Defined Sports Ticker” Laura Oberholtzer Director, TV & Media Solutions Ericsson. Filmed June 10-12 2013. Video courtesy The Cable Show.

“The TV UX – Reimagined with RDK” Jaison Dolvane President & Co-founder Espial. Filmed June 10-12, 2013. Video courtesy The Cable Show.

“RDK and Making Sure Your Kids Get Where They’re Going” Glee Abraham, Solutions Engineering Manager at Tata Elxsi. Filmed June 10-12, 2013. Video courtesy The Cable Show.

There are few times in life where leaks are a good thing. When faucets, hoses, noses, plumbing, roofs, or secrets leak, for instance, it’s cause for immediate corrective action.

The same is true in software — sometimes. There’s the “memory leak,” for instance. Here’s how it manifests in everyday tech talk: “Within a week, they found something like 100 memory leaks in our browser.”

Memory leaks in software generally get pinned on bad code-writing. Like not emptying the trash before leaving on a trip, memory leaks in software happen when the part of the code that places items in solid state memory during processing aren’t cleared out, when that particular module completes what it was written to do.

The result: The software equivalent of something smelling bad. Technically, those memory resources appear unavailable for the next batch of code needing them. Symptom? Software that slows down or glitches.

Recently, however, we happened upon evidence of leakage in software imbued with a whiff of goodness:  The “intentionally leaky abstraction.”

The term arose in a discussion about the Reference Design Kit (RDK) — an effort spearheaded by Comcast, and now under its own roof, with flanking support from Time Warner Cable, Liberty Global, Kabel Deutschland, and other unnamed global cable providers.

RDK aims to make the primary TV screen more accessible to innovation, and the “second screens” in our lives accept cable video applications more easily. It’s a list of open and shared-source software components (like Blink, QT, GStreamer, and HTML-5, among others) that can be used, in tight combination, to get to market more quickly with cable-specific hardware.

Let us now break down the “intentionally leaky abstraction.” Abstractions, in general, exist to occlude the underlying resource details. When you save a file to your hard drive, you hit “save.” The step-by-step minutia of how that happens is abstracted from you (thank the heavens and stars.)

The “leaky” part of the “intentionally leaky” abstraction is kind of a stretch, because nothing actually leaks. Rather, “leaky” implies that the layers of the stack (most software discussions happen in the context of stacks) aren’t sealed off. Coders have visibility “all the way down to the metal” — the silicon chip itself.

This fits, albeit awkwardly, with the definition of open that goes like this: Closed things make you wait in line: Someone (Apple, Google, etc.) must change the code and re-release it, before you can proceed. Open is about being able to “see” into the stack, to do things yourself. Transparently. Self-serve. With tools that enable the drill-down.

That way, entire communities can continue coding, to refine and advance whatever the effort. It’s an “intentionally leaky abstraction” in that there are ways to see and manipulate the code in each layer.

So. May your memory never leak, and your abstractions leak in ways that help you make better products!

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

After thumbing through every 2014 issue of this magazine, five tech trends rose to the top:

1. We’re now squarely in the middle of the transition to “all-IP” (Internet Protocol), as the umbrella covering cloud-delivered services, bandwidth (wired and wireless), connected devices, TV everywhere, and all else in the technological vogue. It began with the cable modem, in the late ‘90s. Nobody really knows when the “all” part of “all-IP” will happen — but “not in my lifetime” is a seldom-heard response.

2. This year, the term “OTT” — Over-the-Top — became less a categorical description of Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the new ilk of video competition, and more a common technological ingredient, used by all. In short, with every step toward cloud, operators are “over-the-topping themselves.”

3. The recognition that “the competition” now extends beyond satellite and telco-delivered services, to the OTT camp, brought with it a new “tech culture” reality. Vendors, operators and programmers alike spent a sizeable chunk of 2014 retooling to work at “web speed,” which means adopting agile software and “DevOps” strategies.

4. RDK, the Reference Design Kit, rose in strategic importance this year, again, and big time. Evidence: In October, Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries off-handedly called RDK “a DOCSIS moment,” referencing the cable modem specification that changed the economics of what became the broadband industry.

5. “Speed vs. capacity” will sustain as one of the more important tech subtleties. It’s the “gig” that can gum things up: GigaHertz is a unit of capacity, Gigabyte a unit of storage, and Gigabit a measure of speed. But! As important is throughput, or, the amount of stuff we’re moving to and from our various screens. Knowing the distinctions matters.

That’s the short list! Merry merry, and may your 2015 technologies be kind and useful.

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

One of the questions swirling around the topic of RDK – the Reference Design Kit – is what it means, beyond getting to market more quickly with hardware and cloud-based services.

Perhaps this was best phrased by reader John, who sent this emailed query last week: “RDK, service velocity, got it. Have you any more consumer-facing angles, so that I can pitch this to my management for budget? And win?”

Well, John. Far be it from us to separate a man from a budget. And, as luck would have it, that RDK session at TVOT, the audio of which is finally up on iTunes, highlighted three use cases that may inform your mission.

First: RDK as a way to enable better, faster graphics, by making it easier for people within the RDK community to “see” and use each other’s advancements. Take chip providers, for example. They build out product roadmaps just like anyone else. For them, a feature advancement, like  “hardware acceleration,” makes graphics more crisp and swift.

The example shown at TVOT was Espial’s HTML5-based navigation of TV, on a tablet. Two things made it visually an ooo-ahh: The crispness of the graphics, and how quickly one could scroll through titles (with cover art).

And what made that possible was the use of RDK components that exposed ways for developers, like Espial, to reach directly down to exposed “hooks” in the chip. The difference is, before RDK, a developer up top couldn’t get directly to a feature set in a chip.

Two: RDK as a way to port apps developed for mobile, to TV. Ericsson was the example on this one, with a sports app it had originally developed for use on mobile devices. Using RDK, they were able to port it to TV in two weeks.

For that app to be ported to existing, non-RDK set-tops, they would’ve needed Java developers to learn the Java class libraries that are part of OCAP (Open Cable Applications Platform).  Learning curve: Steep.

Third example: Porting services like Twitter to TV, with built-in channel change capabilities. Symphony Teleca (which also goes by “ST”) was the demo darling for this one, showing a way for the viewer to enter the Twitter hashtag of the show of interest, then see all tweets related to that show spill across the screen, live.

“It’s a great example of how a developer was able to tap into something that already exists, like the Twitter RSS, and bring that into a TV environment – without having to kjnow anything specific about the set-top box,” explained Steve Reynolds, SVP  of premises technologies for Comcast, who narrated the three use cases at TVOT.

The hashtags can also be used to change channels, which sounds easier than it really is. “It sounds obvious, but it’s not easy,” Reyolds noted. “I’ve been doing this for a while now, and it’s one of those problems that we had to solve for over and over again.”

John, hope that helps. And may the budget forces be with you.

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

It’s Cable Show time again, so it’s time to sift through this year’s grab-bag of tech-speak. Always a gas!

Let’s start with The Gig. In sessions, in “The Observatory” area of the show, and likely in news, you’ll be hearing about Gigs.

Funny thing about the Gig: It’s a unit of measure, yes, but in cable, it carries three distinctly different meanings. One involves speed, one involves storage, one involves capacity.

Back to basics: “Giga” means “billion.” It comes after “Mega,” for million, and before “Tera,” for trillion.

A few handy contextual references: There are (roughly) as many bits in a Gigabit per second as there are Facebook members; a Gigabit per second is more than 15,000 times faster than the fastest ever dial-up modem (56 kbps.)

Let’s do it in hamburgers. Let’s say the average person eats 150 burgers per year. If bits were burgers, it would take the Earth’s entire population about 7 million years to eat as many burgers, as a Gig is in bits. (Burp.)

So whether you’re talking speed, storage or capacity, Gigs are big.

Gig-wise, what you’ll be hearing about at Cable Show is speed. Gigabits per second, specifically. Synonymous with billions of bits per second.

But! The Gigabyte is a unit of storage. Bits and bytes are different; rule of thumb is, there are eight bits in a byte. Gigabytes come into play when talking about how big something is to download.

And then there’s the GigaHertz (GHz) – a measure of capacity. Most cable systems are built to top out between 750 MHz and 1,000 MHz, and 1,000 MHz is the same as 1 GHz.

THE CLOUD VS. THE GATEWAY

Another chewy set of intertwined topics sure to unfold in DC: The cloud, versus the gateway. Does one (cloud) ultimately supplant the other (gateway)? Putting video in the cloud – which also goes by network DVR, although the two have subtle differences – is a hot topic because it’s a great way to keep stuff consistent, one screen to the next.

In tech talk, that batch of activities is known as “preservation of state” – “pause” is a state, for instance. So is “play,” when you resume.

Yet, the show floor will be bulging with gateways. Half cable modem, half set-top, they’re hot because they’re a way to bridge from today’s world (set-tops connected to TVs), to the other today’s world (tablets, PCs, gadgets connected to cable modems.)

In the fullness of time, “gateways” will persist as the thing in the home that exists to do the things the cloud can’t yet do, or isn’t as good at doing. Like pausing live TV, for instance. Buffering locally, so far, works better than buffering in the network.

Reference Design Kit  / “RDK”

As you wander the show floor, you’re likely to see signage and demo-buzz about “RDK,” which stands for “Reference Design Kit.” It’s not the easiest thing to wrap the head around, because it happens at the intersection of silicon, and standards. It started out as a Comcast thing, but is expanding to other MSOs. Something like 20 RDK constituents will be showing their stuff this week.

People involved with RDK like it because it shaves time from how long it takes to get new hardware and services to market. It shaves time because it eliminates the repeating labyrinths of regression testing that occurs, as a device moves from chip to manufacturer to MSO to service environment.

NCTA Newbies

Close to 50 companies will be exhibiting for the first time this week – on the tech side, companies like LG Electronics (connected devices), DigitalSmiths (search and recommendation), Qwilt (OTT traffic management), and Ruckus Wireless (“wickedly fast wireless.”) My personal favorite NCTA newbie, as a beekeeper: Beesion, which apparently does business support systems. I like the honeybee in the logo.

Parting thought: Take a moment to think through how much effort goes into putting on an event as big and multi-faceted as Cable Show. Be sure to thank any NCTA people you see. They’ve been working their brains out.

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