virtualization

Start Your Jargon Engines!

AMSTERDAM–Nothing like back-to-back trade shows to kick in the jargon engines! First was IBC, in Amsterdam last week; SCTE Cable-Tec Expo hits Denver this week.

 

 

Three terms popped up with amusing regularity at IBC: “Workflow,” “cloud,” and “virtualization.” Translations follow.

 

Examples, from piles of notes: Workflows can be 4K, file-based, and complex. Workflows in production and distribution are changing because the video content lifecycle is changing, one IBC session aspired to explain; “build a future-proof media production workflow,” another hawked.

 

Translation: A “workflow” is telco- and IT-speak for a business policy that needs to be teased out (with an API!) of its legacy (old fart) bindings, then recombined, as a spew of data recognizable by other spews of data (sister API!), to do its intention. Turn it on, turn it off. Encrypt it, decrypt it. Code it, transcode it, decode it.

 

“Cloud,” as it relates to the non-atmospheric, needs an immediate and explicitly silent sabbatical of an indeterminate length. We will happily contribute to that here.

 

Which brings us to “virtualization.” Always just like that, wrapped in quote marks on the page, and spoken with accompanying air squiggles.

 

Here’s what’s going on with “virtualization.” Everything in our digital lives that was purpose-built is at a brink. Depending on the point of view, the camera that is just a camera, nothing else, or the phone that is just a phone, nothing else, might be on the endangered species list. Why, because it becomes a feature, and not just in your phone or tablet. It gets virtualized.

 

But! If your digital life is like mine, your phone’s camera is already better than your regular camera (which you think might be in the garage somewhere), and your phone’s phone is a pretty crappy experience.

 

So, in one sense, “virtualization” unleashes a potential software renaissance for the core workings of our digital stuff, to trick them out with a continuously improving webbing of software-created accouterment.

 

In another sense, “virtualization” casts some of the stuff in our gadget gardens into the digital doldrums. A digital doldrum device is anything you still own, but don’t use because you can’t find the charger, BluTooth-to-USB dongle, or other mission-critical thingie.

 

Ultimately, the answer depends on the degree of usefulness of the potential accouterments of the renaissance.

 

Either way, it’s coming. Because to virtualize is to gear up to work at “web speed,” like all companies “born on broadband” (name any over-the-top provider of anything) already do.

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

 

 

On “Virtualizing” Cable

This week’s translation delves into yet another vat of software-side activity intersecting with cable and broadband: Virtualization.

It and its sidekick, the “virtual machine,” are not new concepts. Back in the 1960s, IBM Corp. “virtualized” the resources within its mainframe computers, so that different applications could share amongst them.

Everything we call “cloud” today began as “virtualization” — defined as creating simulated versions of things, from compute to connectivity to storage.

These days, it’s hard to identify things that aren’t being virtualized.  Including the network itself. Not the physical wires and amplifiers, of course. But slowly and surely, functions that used to be in one physical place get re-done in code, and moved “into the cloud.” They become “virtual machines.”

The list of activities common to cable plant, that are on the list to get “virtualized,” include real-time encoding, trick-play (fast forward, rewind) television, even headend video controllers.

Say you have a proprietary video controller (which advanced-class readers know as “DNCS” and “DAC”), one per headend. Say one particular market comprises 40 headends. Making changes — to add features, or fix bugs — meant hitting those racks of gear one by one, 40 times over. Virtualization enables an instantaneous upgrade of all of them.

This type of “infrastructure virtualization” is happening for two reasons: Pervasive broadband connectivity, and entities like Amazon, which rent out general compute resources as needed.

In cable, the first real example of virtualization and cloud is the digital video recorder. If you’re in a Comcast market, and have experimented with its recent shift to X2 navigation, you’ve already experienced the shift of your recorded stuff from the box under the TV, to the network itself. Is it still your stuff? Yes. Is it sitting as a copy on the box in your living room? No. Does it work the same? Yes.

That’s a quickie on “virtualization,” as the training wheels to “cloud.”

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