coverstory_cover story 09/05/2014 18:46 Page 1
o
t Cable Congress in
Amsterdam in mid-March
2014, Caroline van Weede,
managing director of Cable
Europe, declared that cable was ‘The
King of Content Delivery’, based on its
ability to deliver to multiple screens,
its integration of pay-TV with Smart
TVs, and its pairing of TVs with mobile
devices.
For many cable operators and their telco
counterparts and DTH competitors, the
digitisation of networks has enabled a
greater array of services to be carried, but
with TV Everywhere, 4K, multiple formats,
multiple managed and unmanaged services
and bandwidth demand, a strain is being
placed on networks even as they upgrade.
Where can they find relief; HEVC
transcoders, edge servers, intelligent
gateways, nano- CDNs? Is IP delivery part of
the solution and what timescales are
involved?
RJ Visser, Entropic’s senior director of
marketing, says that over time, IP is set to be
the main form of transport for video on cable
networks as it can best enable flexible
service provisioning on the network.
“However, the transition to an ‘all IP’
network involves significant infrastructure
investment and, while the initial steps are
under way, these changes do not happen
overnight. Typical cycles for this type of
evolution are between five to 10 years and
vary among cable operators depending on
their management focus, subscriber base
and ARPU,” he advises.
PROTOCOL. David Baumann, CTO at
ContentBridge, notes that IP is a network
protocol whereas TCP is a transport
protocol, suggesting that there will be a
point in time when all TV content is
delivered exclusively through IP Networks.
“I believe that will be a very long time –
more than ten years- if
ever, because TCP/IP will
struggle to be as efficient
at delivering live linear
content to a large viewing
audience as a basic
broadcast network
across the entire
delivery chain.
A
“IP cannot yet scale to
meet the demands of
mass broadcast video.”
Ian Trow, Harmonic
16 EUROMEDIA
Broadband cable has
long positioned itself as
the technology best
placed to meet today’s
communication and
media consumption
needs, but is facing
increased demands on its
networks. Colin Mann
asks what steps are being
taken and need to be
taken in the future to
maintain quality and
service levels.
Now, the last mile (or couple of miles) to a
consumer may soon become entirely IP, but
other broadcast and cable video technologies
will still exist in the delivery chain for a
while yet. The networking equipment to
support DOCSIS 3.1 is in development, but
won’t be available broadly until perhaps late
2015. Deployments will occur in 2016, so it
is possible that by 2017, IP will be the
default video network protocol for a sizeable
number of connected households,” he
suggests.
Michael Dale, Kaltura’s senior director of
product, suggests that pay-TV broadcast
services are being challenged by the organic
growth of OTT/IP services on a massive
scale. “In the important youth demographic,
OTT has largely eclipsed traditional ‘live TV’
broadcasts. In many ways we have already
crossed over: IP distribution is the basis for
all new video initiatives,” he asserts. He says
the existing business models used by pay-TV
service providers have delayed the full
transition to IP-based distribution outside of
specific consumer demographics such as the
‘cord cutters’. “But the transition is still
active and should be fully realised over the
next five to ten years,” he adds.
According to Ian Trow, senior director of
emerging technology and strategy at
Harmonic, IP will continue to make
significant inroads in video delivery,
especially for OTT and catch-up content.