VOD

What’s Rich About the Rich Edge?

Long ago, in March of 2005, this column took on a popular term in tech-talk, at the time: “The edge.” Which one? Where is it?

And here we are, almost a decade later, still talking edges. Except something changed: The edge picked up some serious semantic bling, especially in the Prefix Department.

It’s not just “the edge” anymore. It’s “the rich edge.” “The intelligent edge.”

As a word that routinely crisscrosses between everyday talk and shoptalk, the “edge” can befuddle. There’s the edge of the counter, and then there’s the edge of the network.

Back then, we polled engineers: Where’s the edge? Responses: “It’s where RF goes to IP, or visa versa.” “After the headend, before the eyeballs.” “At the output of the set-top box.” (Still my personal favorite: “It’s where the bits fall off.”)

Our conclusion, back then, was that “the edge” is in the eye of the beholder, because different work disciplines see edges differently.

And now, those edges are rich and smart. What happened?

First of all, this is “rich” as in “having or supplying a large amount of something that is wanted” more so than “sacks full of cash.” In a connectivity sense, edges are places where stuff gets handed off: Backbone traffic to regional fiber rings; fiber rings to nodes; nodes to homes and the connected stuff within them.

The “large amount of something” is where the intelligence comes in. It’s the addition of compute and storage resources — those building blocks of “cloud.”

The quest for rich, intelligent edges is the reason why traditional cable headends are becoming headend/data centers, with racks and racks of servers adjoining the traditional functions of signal demodulation, encryption, processing, re-modulation, and combining.

It’s most evident right now in video services. Remember when VOD began? Storage was distributed, per market. Titles were “pitched” (via satellite) to hundreds (thousands?) of recipient “catchers.”

Then “CDNs” (Content Delivery Networks) happened, with big “origin” servers in the middle, and video zipping to markets over terrestrial fiber.

“Rich edges” are morphing VOD yet again: Small, nimble storage, buttressing the big servers in the middle, and designed to both anticipate and locate the most popular content closest to viewers.

VOD is but an early example of a “rich edge” transformation. It’s what happens when “connectivity” (broadband) gets gussied up with the building blocks of cloud, so that our “connected” things work better — faster, and more intuitively.

Nonetheless, our advice remains the same, when it comes to the edge: Always ask. Asking “which edge?” and now, “what’s rich about it?” does two things. It shows the speaker’s knowledge precincts, and it spares you envisioning a different edge than the one being discussed.

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

2013: The Year of Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI)?

Far be it from us to declare anything the year of anything. It’s usually a fruitless exercise, fueled by the revenue yearnings of a vendor community, and it almost always turns out wrong. As the venerable Bob Miron, retired head of Advance-Newhouse, once said: “The difference between early and wrong is indistinguishable.”

This column succumbed, incorrectly, to the allure of “year of” hype at last three times over the last decade: In 2001 (VOD), 2006 (OCAP), and 2010 (EBIF.) In chronological order: Early, wrong, and wrong.

Yet! Were we to again tiptoe along the slippery slope that is “year of” guesses, we’d have to go with “DAI.”

Why? Because anytime a studio honcho foists such an arcane tech-term into a speech, it gets instantly imbued with a dash of authenticity. Like so: “We need DAI,” said Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer, during a CTAM Summit keynote in late October. “Our FearNet channel has 30 million subscribers. Without DAI, we can’t monetize it.”

“DAI” stands for “Dynamic Advertising Insertion.” It’s the three letter acronym comprising the technologies that splice refreshed ads into stored VOD content. So, instead of settling in to Fargo during the first big snowstorm, only to see ads for lawnmowers, maybe you see an offer for a parka, Or a wood-chipper.

Networks and MSOs want DAI as a way to monetize VOD, especially as the category expands into a repository for not just movies, but also the new-ish category that is “marathon viewing” of episodic TV.

It ties into the Nielsen C3 world, too. Right now, C3 is a DVR (digital video recorder) thing, created to account for content viewing that doesn’t happen in real time. It creates a number for average commercial ratings, over a three-day period, after the live broadcast.

Work is underway to extend that model to VOD, too. It’s called “ODC3,” for “On-Demand C3.” For an episode of, say, Top Chef, an ODC3 number would collect ratings for the live airing, plus the following three days of DVR viewing, plus ratings for any subsequent VOD viewing.

On the tech side, it’s happening. Here’s how a Comcast technologist put it recently: “Two years ago, we were at the cave-writing stage. Now, we’re ready to roll it (DAI) out pretty much everywhere.”

If that’s true, and if more studio and network CEOs are as keen on it as Feltheimer, then maybe 2013 becomes the year of DAI. If nothing else, it’s a plausible new revenue daydream —  for networks and operators.

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

The Thing About Linear Video

Language gets weird. Even what seems obvious can quickly muddle. I’m reminded of a panel about over-the-top video, where a representative of that community (okay, it was Roku) made this polite, explanatory remark about the types of video the device can stream: “We call them ‘channels.’ ”

The audience was nearly 100% cable people. I couldn’t resist this retort: “We do too!”

Language gets especially weird around seemingly obvious stuff in tech. Here’s a recent example: “Linear IP video,” to describe what we nowadays call live, broadcast television. What you get through your set-top (broadcast TV), except it comes through your cable modem (that’s the IP part.)

Channel by channel, show by show, linear TV – but delivered in IP. So, in that sense, the term “linear” was teased out a bit, to mean “broadcast.”

So far so good. Except for one important technical distinction: By definition, video delivered via a cable modem – in IP — isn’t broadcast. It’s switched.

Broadcast is one to many.  One channel, one “stream,” sent over the air or over a wire, to millions of receiving TVs.

Stuff that goes through the headend part of the cable modem – the CMTS, for Cable Modem Termination System – is inherently switched. Session-based. Clicking on a link to watch a YouTube instantiates a stream between them and your screen. One to one.

The tech name for this (perhaps predictably) is “unicast.”

Unicast is fine, but it’s a bear on bandwidth. Imagine if we all streamed the SuperBowl as unicast sessions. Hundreds of millions of people, all asking for the same thing — but it ships stream by stream, not in bulk.

Tough on the pipes.

Happily, people are already tackling this conundrum. They call it “multicast,” which is essentially the IP version of what we now call “broadcast.”

Instead of asking for your own stream, you do the streaming equivalent of flipping up the flag on your (physical) mailbox. Then you “join” that stream, along with anyone else in your node who may be streaming it.

Switching is not a new one on cable. VOD was the first example – you request a movie, the VOD server sets up a session with you and only you. Next, switched digital video (SDV) technologies emerged as a way to recycle available digital bandwidth.

Does this linguistic gymnastics matter? Not really. Television will continue to steamroll onto different screens, served by different networks, in different ways. But the next time you hear “linear IP video,” you can at the least make a snappy remark about how it’s technically not linear, because it’s switched. So there.

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

 

 

Western Show CableNet 2000, Part 4 – Hype? What Hype?

In the fourth and final segment of this Western Show 2000 panel, we delve into that big gap between press releases and actual consumer deployments. What needs to happen in 2001 to change that? Stump: Broadband marketing and moving services faster. Baumie: VOD as an application cable’s competitors can’t easily emulate; HDTVs are a CableNET feature but they’re not in consumer homes.

Filmed by Steve Nelson for The Cable Channel.