CED Magazine, May/June 2015

®

TH E PR E M I E R MAGAZ I N E OF B ROADBAN D TECH NOLOGY | www.CE Dmagazine.com | May/June 2015

The shootout at the dawn of digital TV ● The CED Interview:

A Q&A with Kevin Hart ● The edge: this is not

Your father’s pre-fab ● Service Assurance:

Going proactive

inperspective GENERAL MANAGER Nick Pinto 973-920-7745 nick.pinto@advantagemedia.com

“That’s done”

Comcast now has more broadband subscribers than video customers. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts at the most recent INTX told an audience of putative peers, “We won’t call it the cable industry anymore; that’s done.”

There were thousands of people in that audience who have devoted years – decades for some of them – building cable into the dominant force it now is, who are justifiably proud of that, who don’t also own broadcast networks and

By Brian Santo theme parks, and who aren’t ready to accept that the cable industry is done.

Editor-in-Chief NCTA president Michael Powell understands this, presumably why he wasn’t ready to abandon the word “cable” just yet.

Distinctions The reason the show was rebranded, he said, was “to extend our peripheral vision. It’s time to look beyond our traditional among serbounds, and the traditional players, and have a conversation.”

Part of the idea of INTX – which stands for Internet plus…, vice proum…, X – was to “converse” with Internet companies, including application developers. They weren’t much in evidence. viders are Cable has as much or more in common with AT&T, Verizon, Google Fiber, Dish and DirecTV. The NCTA touted the fact getting blurthat representatives of many of those companies signed up to attend INTX. They weren’t much in evidence either, though. rier and less Service providers are all offering the same or similar bundles. Distinctions between service delivery mechanisms meaningful have never meant anything to consumers. The majority of equipment vendors don’t much care which industry segment their customers self-identify with.

And here are AT&T and DirecTV, about to erase the distinction between telcos and satellite companies, while a growing number of cable operators are integrating Netflix, Hulu, and similar services into their own, raising the question: over what top?

Distinctions are going to continue getting blurrier with the long inexorable transition to IP, the adoption of SDN, and the growing reliance on off-the-shelf networking equipment.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler explained to the INTX audience why the FCC opposed the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable The key issue wasn’t video, he said, it was broadband.

It isn’t necessary to agree with the FCC’s reclassification of broadband to grasp the bottom line on the maneuver: it’s all going to be broadband.

On that, oddly enough, Roberts, Wheeler, and even Powell are actually much in agreement with each other.

To read past columns, visit www.CE Dmagazine.com

EDITORIAL Editorial Director David Mantey david.mantey@advantagemedia.com Editor-In-Chief Brian Santo brian.santo@advantagemedia.com Associate Editor Helena Fahnrich helena.fahnrich@advantagemedia.com ADVERTISING/SALES Regional VP Sales - East Glen Sundin 973-920-7038 glen.sundin@advantagemedia.com Regional VP Sales - Midwest Mike Francesconi 973-920-7742 mike.francesconi@advantagemedia.com CUSTOMER SERVICE For subscription related matters contact Omeda Customer Service: 847-559-7560 or abcen@omeda.com For custom reprints and permissions, The YGS Group 1-800-290-5460 reprints@theygsgroup.com

ADVANTAGE BUSINESS MEDIA 100 Enterprise Drive, Suite 600, Rockaway, NJ 07866-0912 Phone: 973-920-7000; Fax: 303-770-1458 www.CEDmagazine.com Jim Lonergan Chief Executive Officer Terry Freeburg Chief Financial Officer/ Chief Operating Officer Beth Campbell Chief Content Officer CED is an officially recognized publication of the SCTE.

Volume 41, No. 3 CED® (ISSN #1044-2871, USPS #330-510), (GST Reg. #844559765) is a registered trademark of and is published 6 times a year (bi-monthly) by Advantage Business Media, 100 Enterprise Drive, Suite 600, Box 912, Rockaway, NJ 07866-0912. All rights reserved under the U.S.A., International, and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, electronic recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Opinions expressed in articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Advantage Business Media or the Editorial Board. Periodicals Mail postage paid at Rockaway, NJ 07866 and at additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send return address changes to CED, P.O. Box 3574, Northbrook, IL 60065. Publication Mail Agreement No. 41336030. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Imex/Pitney Bowes, P.O. Box 1632, Windsor Ontario N9A 7C9.

Subscription Inquiries/Change of Address: contact: Omeda Customer Service, P.O. Box 3574, Northbrook, IL 60065-3574, 847-559-7560, Fax: 847-291-4816, email: abced@omeda.com. Change of address notices should include old as well as new address. If possible attach address label from recent issue. Allow eight to 10 weeks for address change to become effective. Subscriptions are free to qualified individuals. Subscriptions rates per year are $64 for U.S.A., $85 for Canada, $92 for Mexico & foreign air delivery, single copy $7 for U.S.A., $10 for other locations, prepaid in U.S.A. funds drawn on a U.S.A. branch bank. Notice to Subscribers: We permit reputable companies to send announcements of their products or services to our subscribers. Requests for this privilege are examined with great care to be sure they will be of interest to our readers. If you prefer not to receive such mailings, and want your name in our files only for receiving the magazine, please write us, enclosing your current address mailing label. Please address your request to Customer Service, P.O. Box 3574, Northbrook, IL 60065-3574.

Printed in U.S.A.: Advantage Business Media does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in the material contained herein, regardless of whether such errors result from negligence, accident or any other cause whatsoever. The editors make every reasonable effort to verify the information published, but Advantage Business Media assumes no responsibility for the validity of any manufacturers’ claims or statements in items reported. Copyright ©2015 Advantage Business Media. All rights reserved.

www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

3

may/june ’15 CED MAGAZINE

Features

Volume 41, number 3

Departments UPFRONT 5 The consolidation roundelay continues 6 Video sub growth tanks; cable kills in broadba nd 7 Cable identifies medical as a healthy opportunity

FEATURES 21 THE CED INTERVIEW: A Q&A WITH KEVIN HART 22 NETWORK MONITORING: THE CASE FOR STRATEGIC ASSURANCE FOR CABLE 24 PRE-FAB: PRE-FAB SYSTEMS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE NETWORK EDGE

COLUMNS 3 IN PERSPECTIVE 8 MEMORY LANE 9 SUBSCRIPTION IQ 10 OPEN MIC

13 Just in time transcoding is coming Two of the key tools for implementing and managing multi-screen delivery are transcoding and repackaging. Those two tools continuously evolve, and the ways they are used evolve too. Just in time packaging, which was commercialized a few years ago, gave content providers new options for handling content, and the technique is becoming more and more commonly employed. Now there’s a new wrinkle being developed: just in time transcoding.

By Brian Santo, Editor-in-Chief

16 The shootout at the dawn of digital TV

In the mid-1980s, Japan proposed an analog HDTV system that would dramatically improve TV picture quality. Europe responded with an analog HDTV system of its own. In the U.S., the FCC set up a competition, the winner of which would be the American standard. The submissions included several of the world’s first proposals for digital HDTV. That shootout commenced exactly 25 years ago. This telling comes from “Televisionaries,” an insider’s account of the digitization of TV.

By Marc Tayer

4

CEDmay/june2015

11 ENGINEERING-WISE 12 CICIORA’S CORNER 27 CAPITAL CURRENTS

ALWAYSON 26 Web extras 26 Ad index 26 Company list

UPfront

Latest industry news and insights

The consolidation roundelay continues

The Roundelay – Camille Pissarro

E

veryone knew that one way or another there would be consolidation among the top U.S. cable companies, but nobody saw it coming when Altice swept in from Europe to buy a majority interest in Suddenlink.

The deal values Suddenlink at $9.1 billion. It’s a lavish price by many measures. On a per subscriber basis, Altice is paying nearly $6,000, when $4,000 is more like it for a company Suddenlink’s size – 1.5 million subscribers.

The bid also works out to a multiple of at least 6X on EBITDA. That’s high-ish, but Altice can make a case that Suddenlink is worth it if it can reduce Suddenlink’s capex and opex going forward.

Altice prides itself on wringing out costs, and it believes it can squeeze nearly every line item in Suddenlink’s ledger to produce improvements, including reducing churn, making customer care more efficient, and getting better equipment prices.

The reliably acerbic folks at Moffett/Nathanson Research are less sanguine: “Altice’s targeted $215M in synergies would suggest that they can cut 27% out of Suddenlink’s non-programming/non-franchise costs, or more than $11 per subscriber per month. We’ll take the under.”

What Altice paid for Suddenlink is of more than just prurient interest. The company is widely reported to be considering a bid for Time Warner Cable.

But if it has leveraged itself that deeply with Suddenlink, how does it expect to successfully bid on TWC? TWC is available because Comcast, confronted with growing opposition from the FCC and the Justice Department for its takeover attempt, walked away from the deal.

Of course, seeing TWC free again might inspire Charter Communications to come back calling; it was Charter’s failed bid that put TWC in play in the first place.

But first Charter has to figure out if it wants to buy Bright House Networks for $10.4 billion – or a bit over $4,000 per sub for 2.5 million subs (we’re just saying). At press time, the two had given themselves another month to see if they’re compatible.

Charter recently has been marshalling funding in a manner and in a volume that suggests it could make plays for BHN and TWC. …Unless Cablevision entices TWC instead. CEO James Dolan flustered fellow executives from TWC, Liberty Global, Charter, and Cox Communications (all sharing a stage at INTX for a panel discussion) when he invited a merger bid from TWC. Cablevision is a hard sell, though. The company has to compete with Verizon’s FiOS, and that makes anyone who might buy Cablevision unhappy – and anyone who invests in anyone who might buy Cablevision even unhappier.

Suddenlink, Altice excitedly noted, has almost no exposure to FiOS or any other overbuilders.

Meanwhile, Cox is a good merger candidate, but remains aggressively circumspect about what it might or might not do.

And since we’re all speculating, the Charter bid on TWC was instigated by John Malone, chairman of the Liberties (Global & Media), who bought into Charter specifically for the purpose.

If Altice can get regulatory approval to buy Suddenlink, could that encourage Malone to consider a direct play for a U.S. cable operator? Tax-free, of course?

At presstime, AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV appeared headed for regulatory approval. www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

5

UPfront Video sub growth tanks; cable kills in broadband

F

or the last couple of years, subscriber growth on the video side has been fitful, but Q1 was bad. Really, really bad. Like, the-weakest-quarter-for-pay-TVin-at-least-10-years bad.

The cable segment lost 58,000 subscribers, DirecTV and Dish together lost 74,000, the telcos added 140,000, for a net of 7,700 subscribers added.

Bruce Leichtman, the principal of Leichtman Research Group (LRG), which supplied the numbers we’re citing, said part of the reason was that some providers stopped chasing numbers to

focus on high-value/lower-churn customers.

More customers are dropping their subscriptions, though obviously the numbers still aren’t huge. The suspicion remains that many younger people never sign up. MSOs are trying to see if skinny bundles and/or integrating over-the-top rivals directly into the user experience will attract that crowd.

The broadband side is still going gangbusters, however, and cable last year was dominating. Through the last four quarters, cable segment picked up 90 percent of the 3 million new broadband accounts. The top

Pay TV subscribers – first quarter, 2015

cable operators now possess a 60 percent share of the market over telcos, returning to that mark for the first time in ten years, all according to LRG. In a watershed, Comcast reported that it now has more broadband subscribers than video subscribers.

The top cable companies added more than one million subscribers in the first quarter, while the top telcos added nearly 160,000 subscribers. Together, AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS added 573,000 customers, but that was offset by the loss of 463,000 DSL subscribers.

Broadband subscribers – first quarter, 2015

Subscribers at the end of Q1 2015

Net Adds in Q1 2015

Net Adds in Q1 2014

Comcast

22,375,000

(8,000)

24,000

Cable Companies

Time Warner

11,025,000

33,000

(34,000)

Charter

4,288,000

(5,000)

13,000

Cablevision

2,653,000

(28,000)

(14,000)

Suddenlink

1,132,000

(6,400)

2,400

Cablevision

2,767,000

7,000

1,183,600

34,500

1,041,000

28,000

Pay-TV Provider

Subscribers at end of Q1 2015

Net Adds in Q1 2014 Net Adds in Q1 2015

Comcast

22,369,000

407,000

Time Warner

12,581,000

328,000

Charter

5,208,000

136,000

Cable Companies

Mediacom

891,000

1,000

(8,000)

Suddenlink

Cable ONE

421,333

(29,884)

(14,331)

Mediacom

Other major private MSOs

6,435,000

(15,000)

(20,000)

WOW (WideOpenWest)

722,000

(5,800)

Cable ONE

496,579

8,125

Total Top Cable

49,220,333

(58,284)

(50,931)

Satellite TV Companies

Other major private MSOs

6,595,000

60,000

Total Top Cable

52,963,179

1,002,825

16,097,000

69,000

DirecTV

20,412,000

60,000

12,000

Telephone Companies

DISH

13,844,000

(134,000)

40,000

AT&T

Total Top DBS

34,256,000

(74,000)

52,000

Verizon

Telephone Companies

9,246,000

41,000

CenturyLink

6,117,000

35,000

AT&T U-verse

5,993,000

50,000

194,000

Frontier

2,359,500

17,000

Verizon FiOS

5,739,000

90,000

57,000

Windstream

1,132,400

800

Total Top Phone

11,732,000

140,000

251,000

FairPoint

318,378

(3,246)

Total – All 95,208,333 7,716 252,069 Sources: The Companies and Leichtman Research Group, Inc.

Cincinnati Bell

272,700

2,800

Total Top Telephone Companies

35,542,978

162,354

Total Broadband

88,506,157

1,165,179

Sources: The companies and Leichtman Research Group, Inc. 6

CEDmay/june2015

Cable identifies medical as a healthy opportunity

C

able companies are making a concerted effort to market their services to healthcare institutions.

With fiber networks that reach gigabit speeds, dedicated Ethernet connections, and Ethernet virtual private lines (EVPLs), cable operators start with sophisticated connectivity options that they can sweeten with offers to help healthcare providers manage the considerable amounts of data that patient care centers around, and to improve the quality and efficiency of care.

Hospitals use their networks for common IT purposes such as billing, scheduling, email, and web browsing, but they also have specific needs such as transferring exceptionally high resolution images in real-time, and securely handling electronic health records (EHRs). Networks also enable the use of mobile health, and HD videoconferencing.

The FCC’s Omnibus Broadband Initiative report Health Care Broadband in America predicts that health IT will grow in prominence over the next ten years because it will become critical to expanding patient access to primary, acute, and preventive care. Health IT has the ability to eliminate spatial and temporal barriers to patient care by enabling contact between hospitals, and access to specialists, when needed through videoconferencing.

Tracking a patient’s vitals in real-time can help to prevent hospital readmission, and therefore lower costs. The National Broadband Plan notes that remote monitoring of only four chronic conditions

could generate a net savings of $197 billion over 25 years.

The Cooper University Health Care center is an example of how cable services are being incorporated into large scale healthcare institutions. This past January when the medical center expanded its EHR system it chose Comcast Business to provide Ethernet services to improve the reliability and scale of Cooper’s network.

The hospital has a fiber-based Ethernet network service linking 43 locations including hospitals, medical campuses, lab and imaging facilities, outpatient offices, and physicians’ homes with network access thatranges from 10 to 600 Mbps.

While 12 Mbps is enough bandwidth to download an MRI image in 30 seconds, a CT scan requires 800 Mbps for a 30 second download.

This network also includes an Ethernet dedicated internet access (DIA) line at Cooper University Hospital that

reaches 200 Mbps. DIA lines are exclusive to the facility they incorporate and therefore guarantee low-latency, a requirement of remote monitoring devices. The main campus in Camden uses Comcast’s 1 Gbps Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL). It also includes a 6 Mbps EVPL for radiologists so they can access Cooper’s network from home.

EVPLs like these allow healthcare practitioners to review images and EHRs securely, and at any time from any device.

The limitations of heath IT advancement The National Broadband Plan outlines adoption, information utilization, and connectivity as the three main inhibitors of health IT advancement. The plan states, “A key barrier to greater broadband-enabled health IT adoption is misaligned incentives,” and that unfortunately these obstacles prevent many providers from practicing 21st century medicine.

www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

7

memorylane

To read past columns, visit www.CEDmagazine.com

John Malone’s history lesson When Comcast announced its agreement to buy Time Warner Cable in February 2014, the common assumption was that John Malone’s attempt to reclaim a significant position in the domestic cable industry failed, leaving the industry patriarch empty-handed and defeated by a rival.

Deploying Charter Communications as his stalking horse, the Liberty Media chairman had attempted to gain control of Time Warner Cable, only to see his target fall into the hands of the Roberts family. It represented a rare misstep on the part of a legendary figure in the cable business.

Unless it wasn’t.

By Stewart Schley The late Peter Barton, who both charmed and tormented cable TV networks as the chief programming acquisition guy for Media & technology Malone’s Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) during the company’s writer Denver, Colo. heyday, once described his boss this way: “He’s playing chess against you. But the game he’s playing isn’t just the game you see on the board. It’s three games ahead, stewart@stewartschley.com and it’s on a multi-dimensional cube, and he knows every move you’re going to make before you make it.”

Can cable’s Malone’s intellect and understanding of the bigger picture not only built TCI into cable’s largest company, but helped to build most legthe modern cable industry itself.

What Malone prized was what the famed management guru endary Peter Drucker identified as the most powerful business tool impresario of all: scale. With scale came the ability to leverage everything.

Malone got better deals on program costs. He influenced the still make way vendors developed and priced technology. He had more capital to acquire more cable properties than anybody else. TCI scale work? spun a virtuous loop, making money by adding subscribers each quarter and then by plowing the cash it made back into the content and services its systems delivered. It was the media version of rinse and repeat.

The formula had little regard for contrivance. During most of the 1980s TCI ran out of a nondescript, one-floor building tucked behind a quiet, curved street in Denver’s Tech Center business park. For a long time TCI had no public relations department, a staple of other large, public corporations. Journalists who wanted to talk to Malone, one of the most powerful and feared figures in the U.S. media business, put in a call to Malone’s office. More often than not, he returned it.

Since Malone sold TCI to AT&T in 1998 – the one big mistake he now says he made in a brilliant career – the balance of power in cable has shifted away from cable operators and toward video programmers. Their embrace of competitive delivery platforms like satellite TV, telco-video and online platforms opened new markets and improved their negotiating leverage. Cable distributors have been cornered into a difficult place. Programmers learned long ago it’s almost impossible for cable distributors to kick channels off the lineup and live to tell the tale. Over time, this turning of the tables has produced a very different looking P&L for the cable industry. Programming costs now represent the largest expense item for cable 8

CEDmay/june2015

companies. Comcast paid out $9.2 billion for the rights to redistribute TV channels in 2014, equal to 20 percent of its revenue from cable operations.

This redistribution of power contradicts the idea that propelled TCI: cultivate more and better content, license it at a reasonable price, reinvest the proceeds in better content, charge more and create wealth by doing so. Malone had propped up the fortunes and careers of entrepreneurs like Ted Turner and John Hendricks along the way. Now, with large media conglomerates grabbing up networks and consolidating programming, the formula had been ripped apart.

Except: Here’s John Malone again now, rising up from the dust of the vanquished Comcast-TWC deal, reportedly prepared once again to have a go at it. A combination of Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable could create a formidable cable industry player, potentially with as many as 15 million residential video subscribers. At its peak, TCI had 13 million.

If it happens – a big “if,” based on the Comcast unravelling – it will produce a fascinating test. In a much-changed world, where content rules, where distributors have reduced leverage and a where a bunch of people want to see broadband Internet delivery neutered into a utility, can cable’s most legendary impresario still make scale work? More poetically: Can John Malone still play the chess game better than his opponent?

There are a bunch of reasons to suggest he can’t. That the marketplace has transposed the balance of power. That cable’s bundled services model is toast. That the TCI model can’t be recreated.

But a note of caution, everyone: Betting against John Malone rarely works out.

History says so.

subscriptionIQ

To read past columns, visit www.CEDmagazine.com

How HBO Nordic saved HBO Now HBO Nordic never broke its own ice. Nobody pays upfront for an addiction. This is why you can get a month of HBO Now for free. And it’s going to work. Just ask Netflix.

Be kind and rewind with me In the old offline days, cable providers and telephone companies relied on a business model that required them to subsidize installation. To deliver cable or phone service, providers had to mobilize an army of heavy duty trucks and technicians to burrow wires into streets, run them into individual houses and clamp them onto TVs and set-top boxes. To start service, every new subscriber could easily cost upwards of $1,000, so naturally providers would barricade their investments behind tall contracts and barbed termination clauses.

While this model is now obsolete, we have a ways to go before cutting the cord is the quick snip we’d like it to be.

Getting out of a traditional cable contract is still a bruising and costly labyrinth of trap doors and automatons. After all, they’ve been honing their draconian repertoire since the '80s.

It’s in this atmosphere that HBO came of age. They were tied to the provider and served as captains in the battle of the channel bulge.

Gene Hoffman

Chairman and CEO of Vindicia hoffmang@vindicia.com

With a premium service, making it easy for

Xfinity, you’ve got mail. customers By the time broadband arrived, folks came to the entertainment frontlines with all the weaponry they needed for today’s to leave is a content battlefield. The wires were solidly in the ground and, instead of a set-top box, all they needed was a computer and good thing. If a piece of pillaged software. This gave them immediate access to all sorts of explosive entertainment. Now the business was your product the portal itself.

What’s more, the portal overlords couldn’t get all tricky isn’t quite when it came to pricing, because there was always someplace where it where the portal was free. The rise and fall of good old NetZero proved that customers were willing to pay a nomineeds to be, nal fee for a clean experience. AOL learned this when they switched to their unlimited access model. This offered the customers feeling of a free service without all the rogue advertising, and people were willing to pay for it. leave withMost importantly, AOL introduced the free trial that launched a thousand trucks. Mail trucks, to be exact. And out anger. really, what better metaphor for the fact that as long as you own the portal, content can hitch a ride on anyone’s broadband, for all you care. By the time SaaS really landed, people expected to have a sample before they paid. Indeed, HBO Nordic never stood a chance.

Game of bluffs What if they leave at the end of the trial?

All the better.

With a high-value premium service, making it easy for customers to leave is a good thing.

If your product isn’t quite where it needs to be, customers leave without anger. Once the good stuff comes, deserters are easy to reacquire. They know they have nothing to lose.

It’s no surprise Netflix trounced HBO Nordic with initial subscribers on D-Day. Questions of content relevance aside, Netflix was truly risk-free.

The fact is, if HBO had looked hard enough, they’d have noticed they had a solid free-trial proof of concept in their war chest. In the old regime, HBO fought long and hard to get hoteliers to include them in their channel lineups. This gave consumers a taste of what it felt like to watch back-to-back movies in bed without commercial interruption. Yesterday’s inroom movie is today’s back catalogue. Get someone excited with the first episode of Thrones and there’s no way they’re leaving after a month.

The power of Now Here on the home front, after the free month, HBO Now is almost twice Netflix’s ultra-affordable $7.99. The inevitable question is whether or not HBO has the content to justify the cost. This is a question of quality over quantity, and one that we could debate ad infinitum. But right now, $14.99 buys more than access to HBO’s rich library of content. It buys the next phase of freedom from the iron rule of cable and the promise of a fairer content exchange in the days to come. Far more revealing is the fact that by combing the two, $23.98 turns the thought of traditional cable pricing into a veritable [bleep].

www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

9

openmic

To read past columns, visit www.CEDmagazine.com

Practicality over Neutrality The reactions to the FCC’s net neutrality ruling to reclassify the Internet as a telecommunications service were swift. Shortly after the FCC published its order in April, legal challenges flooded in from the American Cable Association (ACA), National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), CTIA, the United States Telecom Association, and AT&T. All of these suits argue the same thing: the FCC is going too far.

By classifying broadband as a “communications” serKevin Riley vice rather than an “information” service, these rulings state that all content from Internet service providers CTO, Sonus (ISPs) is created equal.

Ultimately, this means that bandwidth-demanding LPPSonus@lpp.com streaming services, like Hulu and Netflix, can continue to clog the networks of the companies they compete The bigger against – Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, etc. – while leaving these cable providers to foot the bill. As a result, issue here is ISPs will be seen as the villain with their high monthly about conbills (which are largely a break-even proposition for them) and any lags in service, while content providers tent providers seem the hero with their $10 a month charges.

This is neither practical nor fair. getting a free A free and open Internet is ideal, but the practice of “reasonable network management” is a critical piece of ride and connetwork infrastructure that net neutrality threatens. If sumers geteverything is equal, everything will degrade – or crash – equally. ting cheated However, allowing ISPs to predict how a network will perform and manage traffic intelligently will allow them out of a betto avoid congestion, improving the quality of experience for all consumers. ter experiThis practice also encourages innovation in serence in the vices and cost structures, both from ISPs and content providers. By asking content providers to carry part of the cost of the networks they use, they would be name of neuincentivized to look for ways to reduce network bandtrality. width, perhaps through more advanced video codecs or device caching.

Any costs transferred to consumers could then be offset by decreased costs on their ISP bills.

At the same time, service providers are looking for a solution to expanding network capacity in anticipation of exploding video traffic – whether it be Ethernet-based 10

CEDmay/june2015

backhaul, Wi-Fi network integration and/ or network functions virtualization (NFV).

If they cannot monetize these new network investments though, they may have little choice but to stop innovating.

Additionally, the most glaring error of the recent FCC ruling is its presumption that ISPs have no value to add to the content. It ignores the fact that there will always be content providers and consumers willing to pay a premium to deliver and receive better quality.

Offering these kinds of tiers of service creates more service options and a better experience for consumers who are willing to pay, while also creating new revenue streams for carriers. Consumers that just want their movie from Netflix to come through in high quality no matter the day or time may be willing to pay for that higher quality of experience, and the extra revenue could be directed toward additional innovations.

To be clear though, the idea of ISPs providing lower quality service for certain content providers that they deem competitors is an unfair competitive practice.

The FCC exists to protect consumers against such practices and should be working to battle that.

However, this isn’t like Local Loop Unbundling. The bigger issue here is about content providers getting a free ride and consumers getting cheated out of a better experience in the name of neutrality.

Only time will tell if the FCC can actually enforce net neutrality, but in the meantime, a future where content providers have a vested interest in improving the network experience is less frightening than one might believe. In a model where subscribers pay accordingly for the services they do (or don’t) get, consumers can be the ultimate winner.

engineering-wise Cybersecurity and cable Did anyone else get the willies when the so-called “Guardians of Peace” – how’s that for a cyberterrorist handle? – staged a full-fledged assault on Sony’s corporate network infrastructure late last year?

Never mind the media morsels about who gets paid what in Hollywood or how George Clooney felt about “Monuments Men;” the real impact of the Sony takedown was a realization that no business is immune from cyberthreats. If one of the world’s most prominent international brands could have its communications crippled, its intelBy Mark Dzuban lectual property shared and its innermost dealings bared by President and CEO of the a massive act of piracy, what does that mean for the rest of us?

Society of Cable Here’s the reality for our industry. While Sony’s takedown Telecommunications Engineers followed a disagreement with the North Koreans over the release of “The Interview,” the next incident could be perpetrated by even the smallest of interactions. The result The time is could be a disruption of operator services, violation of long since the privacy of our residential customers or even theft of corporate secrets from the business customer base we have past when worked so hard to build.

If all of this makes you nervous, that’s not a bad thing. lack of serThe fact is that our networks, our facilities and even our customers are vulnerable to denial of service attacks or vice availabilworse. Much as we might try to wish that away, we all need to be mindful of the possibilities, to do our best to keep ity was mereattackers at bay and to be prepared to move quickly in the event that we are breached. ly an inconThe time is long since past when lack of service availvenience to ability was merely an inconvenience to cable customers and security meant protecting against theft of video services. cable cusOne of the hot stories out of the NCTA’s INTX event this year was the likelihood that Comcast’s broadband subscribtomers. ership has now exceeded the total number of the company’s video customers.

Even before Sony was in the headlines, the need to prevent interruptions of cable telecommunications services was high among our priorities. At SCTE Cable-Tec Expo two years ago, Time Warner Cable’s Brian Allen outlined lessons learned from the industry’s response to Superstorm Sandy. One of those is that we are never quite as ready for disasters – whether natural or man-made – as we would like to be.

What can we do to prevent and respond to attacks? Those are the questions that we’re asking an elite team of participants at our Cybersecurity Symposium on Oct. 13, the eve of SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2015. In partnership with our friends at CableLabs, we’ve assembled a lineup that includes experts from within and beyond our industry to share experiences that are relevant to the worldwide cable community.

To read past columns, visit www.CEDmagazine.com

A full list of participants is at http:// expo.scte.org/symposium/ but one of our keynoters will be Chris Roberts, the Founder and CTO of One World Labs.

In April, Chris attracted more notice than he might have liked from the FBI and United Airlines when he Tweeted what he identified as security flaws in air travel.

His message to us will be one of “electronic hopscotch.” With connected devices expected to number up to 30 billion worldwide in just a few years, it’s getting easier and easier for cyber attackers to connect the data strewn across layers of the Internet.

Ultimately, what they uncover can be used against our networks, our customers and ourselves. Scary.

We’ll also hear from two industry veterans who have been charged with securing networks for big events: Bright House Networks’ Trace Hollifield and Comcast’s Bill Sweeney. Trace will discuss the key role Bright House’s audio, video and data networks played during the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, and how Bright House worked with law enforcement to ensure the cyberand physical security of its systems. Bill will share Comcast’s experiences in maintaining their networks during the Olympic Games.

Also on the agenda are a presentation on International Cybersecurity by Liberty Global’s Sean Groenewald and a panel discussion on the value to Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework featuring NIST’s Donna Dodson, CableLabs’ Susan Joseph and NCTA’s Matt Tooley. The day will conclude with CableLabs’ Mike Glenn and SCTE’s Derek DiGiacomo discussing current and future cybersecurity efforts by the two organizations.

The lesson of “The Interview” is this: While no precautions are foolproof, we’re in a constant battle to defend our networks against cybercriminals. At our Symposium in October, we’ll show how cable is taking the high ground in that fight.

www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

11

ciciora’scorner Au revoir, auf wiedersehen, do widzenia Retiring is difficult. This is my third and most successful attempt. The difficulty is that I enjoy what I’ve been doing. So why quit? Because there are other things I want to do that require the time. I want to travel some more and see more of family and maybe write some things less related to technology.

It’s even time to bring this column to a close. My computer has CED columns from 1994 and I wrote for CED years before. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long! I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Most challenging is always the issue of what to

By Walt S. Ciciora write. I don’t think I’ve missed an assigned column. Second challenge is to stay at the word limit. I’ve made it a game to Expert on cable and keep the word count exact. consumer It’s been an amazing ride. I’ve been extremely fortunate electronics issues to be in growing and exciting industries and have known a large number of terrific people. While I was still in college and on a summer job at Illinois Bell Telephone, my boss gave wciciora@ieee.org me one of the best pieces of professional advice. He recomIt’s amazing mended getting involved in industry affairs (maybe I should say “matters”) including writing papers, joining professional to see the organizations, and participating in committees. Not only does this activity bring exposure that opens doors, but it makes the impact of profession much more interesting. I started with the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society while at Zenith and continued personal with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, the Society of Cable Telecommunication Engineers and a computers, few others. These have been great ways to keep up with the technology and know the technologists. I high recommend the Internet, this as a career enhancement technique.

Wi-Fi, over I’ve been fortunate to see massive technological change.

Hard to believe, but my college courses included both vacuum tubes and transistors. When my wife and I mar- the top delivried, a number of her relatives got together and bought us a ery of pronineteen inch Zenith monochrome television. That was a big deal. When I went to work for Zenith in the Chicago area, gramming... color television receivers were expensive and usually had to be ordered. If you were impatient, you paid above list price.

Much of those receivers were built into heavy furniture. When I left Zenith seventeen years later, television receivers were sold in grocery stores for less than ten dollars an inch!

My first projects at Zenith R&D in the mid-1960s involved digitization of video for conditional access. Zenith had an over-the-air pay TV system called “Phonevision” (http://www. earlytelevision.org/phonevision.html) and digital techniques were expected to improve security.

Other projects centered on improved picture quality and receiver performance. Later at Zenith, I became involved with the cable television set top box which we called the Zenith Tiered Addressable Converter, Z-TAC. A major effort was devoted to Teletext, the on-screen text and 12

CEDmay/june2015

To read past columns, visit www.CEDmagazine.com

simple graphics technology that put digital information in the vertical blanking interval.

This was called “new media” and “electronic publishing” and was the early predecessor to the consumer Internet.

Other departments at Zenith R&D worked on “flat panel” television displays. It seemed to always be “ten years into the future”. Work proceeded on plasma, laser, and liquid crystal displays, all intended to replace the vacuum tube picture tube. I doubt that anyone would have predicted today’s pervasiveness of these impressive color displays. Most consumers have a large number of them and take them for granted. Having grown up with the technology, I still find these displays utterly amazing.

I left Zenith in 1982 to join American Television and Communications, ATC, in Colorado as VP of R&D. Our group focused on technology to enable new cable services and improve existing ones. This was an internal cable research department before there was a CableLabs. Principle activities included conditional access, a home security system, a digital audio system, consumer electronics interface solutions, and Time Inc.’s Teletext service. Work began on fiber optics and digitization. The industry decided that it needed an R&D consortium to do this kind of work for the industry rather than on a company-bycompany basis. I became a technology strategist for ATC. At about that time (1989), ATC moved from Colorado to Connecticut and became Time Warner Cable, TWC. Through all this time, technology didn’t just advance, it accelerated. Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC), and digitization changed everything. Digitization made direct satellite delivery competitive and fiber was the cable industry’s competitive response.

I left TWC in 1993 and have been doing consulting as an expert witness in patent suits and few other consulting engagements until about a year ago. I also co-founded three technology start-ups and served on boards and advisory boards. Those activities dug deeply into new technologies.

It’s amazing to see the impact of personal computers, the Internet, Wi-Fi, over the top delivery of programing, video on demand, Digital video recorders, cell phones, telephony without usage charges, and automation. If you allow yourself to contemplate the history of our industry’s technology, the progress is absolutely breath taking.

With this brief look back, I now move on: au revoir, auf wiedersehen, and do widzenia.

Just in time transcoding is coming The plunging price of processing power is making JIT transcoding plausible

By Brian Santo, Editor-in-Chief

Senecal said, “If you’ve transcoded your entire library, and you’ve already transcoded with HLS version 2, say, and then you need to support DASH, then Nobody is making any money on multi-screen you’re going to have to go back and repackage your delivery or TV Everywhere, which understandably entire library just to support those clients.” makes everyone providing those services rather keen on minimizing the associated costs. Two of the “A just in time packager can then just turn on the key tools to help them do that are transcoding and packaging requirements for those new clients, which repackaging. makes it so much easier to handle new packaging reAnyone with physical possession of content – netquirements as new clients come on line,” Senecal said. work operators and their partners –uses transcoding There’s a bit of science involved in deciding where and repackaging resources to help balance the costs of to put packaging/repackaging resources. Actually it’s content storage and transport. just math.

Perrier Those two tools continuously evolve, and the ways A service provider should figure out the number of they are used evolve too. Just in time packaging was clients it has to serve, and then how many clients are commercialized a few years ago. Its introduction gave content provid- going to request video in formats in which it doesn’t pay to prepackage. ers new options for handling content, and the technique is becoming For example, Senecal said, “80 percent of my content requires more and more commonly employed. There’s a new wrinkle currently HLS v4 and we’re going to start with that as a packaged format for being developed called just in time transcoding. More on that in a everybody, and we’re going to use just in time packaging for anyone moment. outside that domain. In that case you’re going to want to push the packager closer to the edge, so that anyone who’s bringing up a Smooth Streaming or DASH request would just hit that just in time packager, Just in time packaging When service providers first began delivering video to mobile de- off of the content which is already cached farther upstream.”

If 5 percent of your clients require Smooth Streaming and you have vices, it was common for them to start with just Apple devices. One a network access point that has to be able to support 100,000 clients, type of device, one video format required. You encode your content you put in a packager that can support up to a maximum of 5,000 in that format, and you ship it out. Easy. clients at that point in the network, he explained.

You want to add another device type – Android, say? Encode your “The key advantage is you have all your Smooth clients, like an content in a second format.

Anyone doing multi-screen delivery has to deliver to a growing list Xbox, which may be a small percentage of your clients – you package of devices, and many of them require their own video formats. A small those on demand,” Senecal said. handful of streaming formats are popular, but there are hundreds.

Encoding each video asset in every single format available would be profoundly impractical; the storage requirements for even a small VOD library would be outrageous.

So the idea is to encode in just the few most popular formats, and/ or encode video in a mezzanine format. From there you transcode and package or repackage whenever you get a request from a device that requires video in an uncommon format.

Mark Senecal, manager product management at Imagine Communications, said, “The advantage of using just in time packaging is an overall savings in storage. When you look at the size of VOD libraries, you’re trying to do HLS, Smooth, maybe Adobe, and DASH, you’re looking at doing four, maybe five, maybe even six different packaging options – it’s a significant savings overall on all of your storage costs and maintenance of that storage.”

Furthermore, clients change over time.

Packaging for the main screen Most of this describes the delivery of on demand video to second screens. But service providers are beginning to consider the value of a first-screen first approach, which would rely on using repackagers in a slightly different way.

“Increasingly, operators are beginning to look at delivering their main-screen profiles – full-size HD – to a smart TV or a set-top using the same set-up,” said Richard Peske VP, video compression and processing products at Arris. “That will allow them to use a common architecture for all their programming. They won’t have to maintain a QAM network for the main TV and ABR for everything else.

“To operate in these ABR environments, you have to create different profiles,” Peske continued. “Those will get packaged with HLS or Smooth or whatever you want to do. It’s becoming more common to www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

13

Peske

store one set of video profiles and package them in real time on the fly – just in time packaging.”

Back to transcoding Today, transcoding is typically being used when preparing an uncompressed video file, or a lightly compressed stream, for storage. At that point, the video is translated into the different profiles that will be consumed on a second or third screen.

But you’re still probably storing video in a small handful of formats, and each of those in multiple profiles – different bit rates and resolutions.

Now consider that video is likely to migrate from high definition (HD) to ultra high definition (UHD). Storage requirements – even with more efficient HEVC encoding – are going to go up and up.

How do you minimize that?

“Rather than storing five, or six or seven different profiles of the same video at different bit-rates or resolutions, you store one mezzanine file in your highest profile, and if you need a lower bit rate or a lower resolution or even a different compression algorithm, do that on the fly,” Peske said. In other words, transcode it.

Transcoders are a lot more computationally intensive than packagers, and therefore you’d need a lot more server power for every single stream. It would be far more expensive than the current approach of using just in time packaging.

Thanks, Gordon This might be another place where Moore’s Law might come to the rescue.

As technology marches forward, the cost of transcoding a stream keeps getting lower and lower, Peske noted. “In a couple years, people think the cost of transcoding a stream, on the fly, just in time? It could be cheap enough that it would outweigh the cost of storing all those streams. It’s a chase as to what is getting cheaper faster – storage or processing. Chip technology at this time appears to be getting cheaper faster than storage is,” he said.

14

CEDmay/june2015

The cost per megabyte of storage is not coming down as fast as Moore’s Law is driving down the cost of processing, Peske observed.

“At some point, the trends cross over, and it makes sense to do just in time transcoding. We’re probably still two, three years off. People will trial stuff maybe next year,” he said, but economic viability will be a few years off.

The cost of storage might drop faster than expected, but that is likely to be offset by the massive amounts of storage likely to be consumed.

“In U.S., everyone is operating under the assumption that for network DVR, you have to store a separate copy for everyone. You can imagine how much storage that eats up,” Peske observed.

At that point, he suggested, it might make sense to do transcoding and repackaging in the same system.

“You’d transcode first, and repackage next. You’d sit it somewhere after the server. It might sit at the origin; it might sit at edge cache. It would depend on how cheap you could get the transcoding.

“You could have both functions on the same server. It could be virtualized in the cloud, and then it wouldn’t matter if they’re in the same box – where they reside could be very flexible,” he speculated.

It’s real, or will be Arnaud Perrier, vice president, strategy and corporate development at Envivio, said there is definitely a trend toward just in time transcoding.

“It’s something we’re investing in. There’s a large amount of longtail content, whether VOD or linear channels. There are PEG channels – they have very little viewership, but they’re must-carry. Pick any one of those channels at any point in time, and the odds are that no one is watching it – zero.”

When that’s the case, dedicating round-the-clock transcoding resources to barely watched or unwatched channels is a waste of money, of transcoding, storage and network costs.

The idea is that you can transcode, package, and deliver on the fly, even if it’s a linear channel, but only when a user actually requests that channel.

“You provision a transcode instance, in the private cloud, when it’s actually being used. If that one user turns it off, you turn off the instance, and you’re not using any resources for that,” Perrier said.

The same approach could be applied to longtail content in VOD libraries. The rule of thumb is that 90 percent of viewers watch only 10 percent of the content, which leaves 90 percent of a VOD library owner’s content eating up storage resources.

“It’s the same idea,” Perrier said. “You transcode from the source, from the mezzanine, on the fly, if and only if it’s being played by an ondemand user.”

Next, Ultra HD video, compressed with HEVC, is added to content libraries. New devices are increasingly supporting HEVC, but that leaves enormous numbers of legacy devices that still need to be fed video. Do you store it all?

Maybe not. A service provider could store content exclusively in HEVC, and use just in time transcoding to deliver video in H.264 to legacy devices.

“If a user requests that HEVC asset from storage, you transcode it back into H.264 on the fly.” It’s not a pure transcoding model, he said, but it is something the company’s current products can do.

“And then there is delivery,” Perrier added. “You can send HEVC over DASH to, let’s say, the newer Samsung TVs. In which case your CDN cost is half of what it would be than in H.264, but you still have to deliver H.264 to the older devices, hence the need for just in time transcoding and packaging.

“For just in time transcoding we’re engaged with two MSOs’ upcoming trials,” Perrier said. “Is there potential deployments this year? Probably not. The technology and the workflow has to mature, but it’s an exciting new development.”

MediaMelon does ABR one better MediaMelon has introduced an enhancement to adaptive bitrate (ABR) technology it says can lower bitrate requirements for video streaming by 35 percent on average.

The startup is currently working with Deluxe OnDemand to implement the technology.

MediaMelon calls its software-based approach “quality bitrate,” or QBR. The process starts with analyzing each video asset for image complexity.

The analyses include rapid scene analysis, content characterization, perceptual quality mapping and advanced buffer management techniques, the company said.

The system then ships the packets associated with lower complexity video at lower bit rates.

By the same token, the system can manage the stream so that high-complexity image segments are represented by packets encoded at the highest bit rates.

In so doing, QBR can not only lower bitrate requirements, it can also reduce content quality variance by an average of 86 percent – thereby eliminating video artifacts – the company said.

www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

15

The shootout at the dawn of digital TV Exactly 25 years ago, the FCC initiated a competition to define the U.S. HDTV standard.

“Televisionaries” is the story of how TV, on its way to going high definition (HD), also went digital, helping to create the satellite TV business, and sparking a revolution in the industry that a quarter of a century later is still playing out.

General Instrument (GI) was among the first companies, if not the first, to believe it could create a commercial, all-digital TV system. Marc Tayer was the project lead and product manager for GI’s digital TV system, and “Televisionaries” is his insider’s account of the digital transition in the TV business.

In the mid-1980s, Japan proposed a new analog high definition television (HDTV) system called MUSE that would dramatically improve TV picture quality. Europe responded to Japan Inc.’s system with its own analog HDTV system, HD-MAC. The U.S. had little history of government-industrial cooperation of that sort. Instead, the Federal Communications Commission set up a competition; the winner would be the American standard. The submissions included several of the world’s first proposals for digital HDTV. That shootout, which commenced exactly 25 years ago, marked the beginning of the digital TV era. CED is pleased to present two excerpts from “Televisionaries,” one about that competition, the other describing a key public endorsement that signaled the cable industry’s resolve to be at the forefront of the digital TV trend.

By Marc Tayer GI knew it was stepping into uncharted territory, outside its comfort zone of satellite and cable TV, when it entered the Federal Communications Commission’s HDTV process, in June 1990, just before the submission deadline. It was supposed to be a straightforward competition with the winning system becoming the U.S. over-the-air digital broadcast standard, thereby garnering the lion’s share of future HDTV equipment royalties. But that was not how it played out in the corridors of Washington.

The broadcasters established the Advanced Television Test Center in Alexandria, Virginia. There would be six sequential “test slots” lasting several weeks each, with each competitor’s system being examined against dozens of criteria. Mark Richer, vice president of engineering at PBS, was assigned to manage and administer the testing process on behalf of Dick Wiley’s FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services (ACATS).

[GI engineer] Woo Paik and his team, having successfully developed the one-off digital SDTV hardware 16

CEDmay/june2015

prototype, were able to apply their laser focus on the next emergency project: the on-time completion of the world’s first all-digital HDTV hardware prototype. With militaristic discipline and a “must do” attitude, the engineers in Paik’s Advanced Technology group worked around the clock, as if their lives depended on it. With GI’s “Slot 3” FCC time window approaching rapidly, this small, devoted group of engineers had only a few months left to complete the digital HDTV encoder and decoder using a 1080-line interlaced (1080i) HDTV system.

Paik’s team was young, smart, and eager. In addition to video compression guru Ed Krause, the group included Vincent Liu, focused on encoding and decoding; Scott Lery and Adam Tom, tasked with the digital transmission subsystem; Rabee Koudmani, project management; Fernando Toro, the analog front-end; and Henry Derovanessian, motion estimation.

Philips, Thomson, Sarnoff, and NBC – the Advanced Television Research Consortium—had Slot 1 in the FCC testing process, set for the

Grand Alliance booth at the 1995 NAB Show. Source: CreativeCow.net

summer of 1991. The basic idea of the consortium’s Advanced Compatible Television (ACTV) analog solution was compelling: it would be a “backward-compatible” system, meaning existing NTSC television sets, over two hundred million of which were installed in homes around the country, could extract a regular, standard definition NTSC signal from the new, enhanced ACTV broadcast signal. From the same aggregate signal, a newly purchased “enhanced resolution” TV set could presumably get a much better picture, although it wasn’t considered true high definition technology.

This elegant idea solved a thorny chickenand-egg problem with respect to introducing a new television standard in the United States.

If the pre-existing TVs and the new, enhanced resolution TVs could each get a picture from the same signal, a smooth and seamless transition to the new standard could be achieved over time. However, as the ACTV system began its testing in the summer of 1991, a fatal problem emerged: the picture quality was deficient. While this system didn’t have a chance, the same consortium had another opportunity with a digital HDTV system it was developing, slated for test Slot 5.

The second contender was NHK, Japan’s state-owned broadcaster, credited with pioneering the development of analog HDTV technology. NHK’s “Narrow MUSE” system had FCC test Slot 2. Narrow MUSE was a derivative of the analog MUSE HDTV system that NHK had developed for satellite delivery.

It had to be “slimmed down” for the much tighter 6 MHz bandwidth constraint of the

U.S. over-the-air broadcast infrastructure. But as with the European consortium’s ACTV system, the picture quality was poor.

Then came the moment the television industry, and the technology field at large, had been waiting for with great anticipation. Computer companies were especially intrigued, eager to see if the digital bits of the computer world would really translate into the moving pictures of the television business. In late November 1991, GI moved its all-digital, 1080i HDTV system into the Advanced Television Test Center’s lab right on schedule. GI had only one rack of equipment for the encoder and a second rack for the decoder. With respect to video quality, this Slot 3 system performed with flying colors, with only one minor glitch that was fixed quickly by a system reset.

The buzz from the private halls of the test lab was that GI’s video quality had been outstanding. This had been the first digital HDTV system ever developed or tested, and the fact that it had surpassed expectations underscored, at long last, that the future of television would indeed be digital. It was a breathtaking moment. The naysayers’ days were numbered. Regardless of whether this particular system would be the ultimate winner, GI had essentially just proved there was no going back. The United States, and eventually the rest of the world, was going digital.

Riding high out of the Advanced Television Test Center labs, GI decided to make a splash and build momentum before the other digital systems had the chance to test. [GI Chairman and CEO Donald]

Rumsfeld, together with our HDTV point man, Bob Rast, and our D.C. lobbyist, Quincy Rodgers, arranged for a major publicity event the following week at the U.S. Capitol Building. It was billed as the world’s first-ever over-the-air digital broadcast of an HDTV program. In reality, a few weeks earlier, Woo Paik and his engineers had secretly arranged with KPBS San Diego to broadcast a digital HDTV signal from PBS’s transmission tower to GI’s San Diego office prior to the big event in Washington. The KPBS test had been a success, powering through the mountains and canyons of San Diego, unfriendly natural obstacles to a digital signal. But this was on a national stage, in the U.S. Capitol Building, and Rumsfeld had told Paik and Rast in no uncertain terms that the historic broadcast absolutely had to work, with 100 percent likelihood.

Midday on March 23, 1992, and then again in the evening, GI successfully conducted a digital HDTV broadcast over the PBS Washington D.C. station. As the American flag fluttered across the screen, its brilliant stars and stripes ablaze with red, white, and blue, the room, which was filled with senators, congressmen, and FCC commissioners, was overcome by an overwhelming sense of patriotism and pride. An American company had achieved what no one thought was possible.

The event was described in GI’s internal employee newsletter: Live from the nation’s capital, with General Instrument chairman Donald Rumsfeld back in familiar territory, GI made broadcasting history on March 23 with a landmark DigiCipher demonstration. At shortly past noon in a room at the U.S. Capitol, Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense and White House Chief of Staff, led the event with opening remarks to a group of television industry notables before signaling to the DigiCipher team to initiate the broadcast. Woo Paik and Chris Higgins passed the word to T. J. Tanner, who was standing by eight miles away at the transmission tower of WETA, Channel 26, a Washington D.C. public TV station. Tanner then switched off the normal NTSC programming and rolled the tape of the HDTV program prepared especially for the occasion.

GI, temporarily freed from the test lab until its Slot 6 GI/MIT system was ready, kept raising the stakes for the other contenders in the FCC competition with a series of firsts. Following the broadcast to the U.S. Capitol, GI conducted the first digital HDTV over-the-air broadcast of live (as opposed to taped) content in April 1992. This event used UHF Channel 15 to send the signal to GI’s demo suite at the Las Vegas Hilton during the

www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

17

National Association of Broadcasters trade show. After that, we proceeded with the first demonstration of a digital HDTV consumer VCR prototype (with Toshiba), also in April 1992; the first two-way cable transmission of digital HDTV in May 1992; and the first satellite transmission of a digital HDTV signal in August 1992.

Meanwhile, when the time had come in the spring of 1992 for Zenith and AT&T to commence their Slot 4 testing, they weren’t ready.

GI had set a very high bar for the Zenith/ AT&T alliance. Their 720-line progressive (720p) digital HDTV system had produced poor video quality in the early testing, and it could have been over for Zenith and AT&T. But they pulled out all the political stops and requested a two-week extension, hoping their engineers could fix whatever issue was causing the video problems. Stuck in the middle of the political wrangling, Mark Richer, the PBS executive who was managing the testing process on behalf of the broadcasters, became visibly upset at Zenith and AT&T’s behavior.

But he didn’t have the authority to disqualify them as they lobbied for an extension of their testing. Then, almost miraculously, the political support they needed came from the most unlikely of places: the next competitor, the Slot 5 Philips/Thomson/Sarnoff/NBC consortium. Given another lease on life, the Zenith/AT&T video quality was tested again, showing a minor improvement but still a poor result overall.2 The Philips/Thomson consortium’s rationale for supporting Zenith/ AT&T’s extension request soon became clear. The Philips/Thomson group wasn’t ready either, so every day of additional testing by Zenith/ AT&T would buy them valuable time for their upcoming Slot 5 testing. But it still wasn’t enough, and the Philips/Thomson consortium still couldn’t deliver its prototype on time. They requested a one-month delay, grounds for disqualification in the eyes of some observers. People were starting to wonder if this was even a real competition.

Rumsfeld, a political operative par excellence, and Rast, whose generous sense of fairness and compromise had been pushed past the breaking point, were incredulous. I remember being in a meeting with Rumsfeld and [GI executive] Jerry Heller during this period, and a phone call came into the office from Bob Wright, the CEO of NBC, which was part of the Philips/Thomson consortium. Wright was asking for Rumsfeld’s support in accommodating their request for delay.

A scornful look enveloped Rumsfeld’s face, but he maintained his professionalism with a polite but firm denial.

18

CEDmay/june2015

Zenith developed the vestigial side band (VSB) modulation scheme adopted by the FCC for the ATSC digital television broadcast standard. Source: Zenith

When the Philips/Thomson consortium’s Slot 5 system finally arrived, it was packaged within fourteen racks of equipment, a monstrosity relative to GI’s streamlined implementation of a single rack each for the encoder and decoder. During testing, the consortium’s 1080i digital HDTV system was riddled with stops and starts, equipment tweaks, and excuses. Because the Philips/ Thomson consortium was so late getting started, it wasn’t going to be able to finish all of its tests on time. It was an almost ludicrous situation that we thought spelled impending disaster for our competitor. But then a whole new series of political machinations ensued, with them being awarded another extension, allowing them to complete all the required tests. At the end of the test period, we heard that the video quality had looked very good.

GI was astounded. The process had been politicized and corrupted. It was spinning out of control. We had one more shot, though.

GI had teamed up with MIT for the Slot 6 system, a 720p progressive digital HDTV system like that of Zenith/AT&T. If we ended up with the best 1080i interlace system, from the Slot 3 testing, and the only strongly performing progressive system in the upcoming sixth and final test slot, all the excuses and delays of our competitors during the previous several months wouldn’t matter. We could still win. But the picture quality of the GI/MIT Slot 6 system, tested late in the summer of 1992, was poor, not even close to the stellar

performance GI had achieved earlier in the year with its Slot 3 system.

It was anybody’s guess what would happen next. GI thought its Slot 3 system had clearly won overall and that the remaining competitors had cheated. But it was far from a slam dunk, especially with the Philips/ Thomson group’s strong video quality performance and the ongoing political gyrations. At one point, Robert Reich, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, released a statement favoring the European-led group, reasoning that they would provide manufacturing jobs in the United States, whereas GI didn’t even make TV sets.

In reality, none of the systems was ready for prime time, each having ample room for improvement, including GI’s. Our system had experienced some problems on the digital transmission side due to interference from adjacent signals. There were no specific rules in place to resolve the conflict, leading to rumblings of another round of testing, along with innuendos of litigation if one competitor was selected as the sole winner. In this overheated environment, there was no way the FCC was going to cleanly pick a single winner.

Inside GI, we were trying to figure out what all this meant for our digital satellite and cable activities. We knew there would be major implications if and when the FCC made a decision, but we didn’t know exactly what form the FCC rules would take or how the cable industry would respond. From the business perspective of most broadcasters, content

digital HDTV would eventually happen. But the near-term opportunities remained in the trenches of the free market, with the imminent decisions of TCI, HBO, and other powerful forces within the media business, not in the bureaucratic hallways of the nation’s capital.

Ultimately, the participants in the competition were encouraged to cooperate. The HDTV Grand Alliance included GI, Zenith, AT&T, MIT, Sarnoff, Philips and Thomson, with each contributing its particular area of expertise to a full HDTV system.

1996 Grand Alliance system at HDTV model station. Source: CreativeCow.net

providers, and cable operators, HDTV was a dubious proposition. It would require large capital investments and allocation of unprecedented amounts of bandwidth, with no assurance that consumers would pay higher service fees or that advertisers would pay higher rates.

GI’s frustration and anger was running high but we forced ourselves to keep the FCC process in perspective. One thing was certain: we had to continue at light speed with our DigiCipher standard definition (SDTV) satellite system. Our digital cable system would soon shift into high gear as well. We had proven without doubt that

In June 1992, Forstmann Little took General Instrument public again in an initial public offering, issuing 22 million shares at $15 each. With Donald Rumsfeld at GI’s helm, the company’s financial performance had improved considerably from the precipitous downturn immediately following the leveraged buyout. The VideoCipher piracy problem had been fixed, the cyclical cable business was recovering strongly, and GI was shipping its first digital SDTV systems to content providers.

AMT is your trusted source for RF Coax.

Count on AMT to supply you with an unmatched selection of Times Fiber coaxial cable and connectors to the broadband industry as well as splitters and amps from Extreme Broadband Engineering.

For more information, call AMT at 888.293.5856 or visit amt.com

6: WK 6WUHHW _ 'HHUĂ€ HOG %HDFK )/ _ _ VDOHV#DPW FRP

0XOWLSOH 6ROXWLRQV 2QH 6RXUFH

Slides from a presentation explaining the Grand Alliance prepared in 1994 by Robert Hopkins, then executive director of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). Source: Robert Hopkins

There was also a growing recognition in pockets of the technology community that, with the advent of digital television, the TV and the computer would come together. GI’s corporate VP of Technology, Matt Miller, was an early proponent of this “convergence,” and he used Don Rumsfeld’s stature to set up an introductory meeting with Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and CEO, in the fall of 1992.

Gates and his chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, hosted Rumsfeld, Miller, and Jim Faust at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Gates was a C-band VideoCipher home dish owner and seemed to know far more about GI and the cable business than GI knew about Microsoft. Nevertheless, he appeared quite impressed with GI’s market position and communications systems knowledge, spanning from digital compression to conditional access technology, and from digital transmission to set-top boxes.

Matt Miller also brought Intel into the mix.

And he began separately discussing a similar initiative with Apple Computer, favored by the GI San Diego team over Microsoft. The San Diego group felt Apple had a much better software user interface and also identified more with Apple’s “think different” out-of-the-box culture, even though Steve Jobs was outside Apple at the time, running NeXT Computer and Pixar. But this concept of merging the personal computer with the digital cable box, while intoxicating, was well ahead of its time.

The annual Western Cable Show in Anaheim, California, was everyone’s favorite industry trade event. More informal than the national Cable Show and less techie than the Cable-Tec Expo, the Western Show had a party atmosphere. Deals were done in the 20 CEDmay/june2015

day and everyone let loose at night. The fun, free-spirited ambience was partly because of the warm Southern California climate, even in December, partly attributable to the content provider community being there in force, their extravagant budgets providing a festive punch, and partly due to plain-old tradition.

Rock bands such as Little Richard and The Bangles played the parties at night, and during the daytime exhibition hall hours, superstar athletes signed pictures at ESPN’s booth while celebrities greeted visitors at CNN and Lifetime. Scantily clad models adorned pedestals at Playboy and Spice, and for those with small kids, The Disney Channel invariably had an on-site artist drawing personalized sketches of Mickey Mouse or Snow White. Disney also hosted private parties at Disneyland, across the street, with a choice ride or two open for its guests. GI held a famous party at the Western Show, where food and drink flowed in a lush garden veranda setting jam-packed with guests, while wheeler-dealers like Frank Drendel, Hal Krisbergh, and Ed Breen held court with their customers.

Year after year, the Western Cable Show was business and trade show entertainment at its best. But the Western Show in early December 1992 was even better for General Instrument. This was the forum at which TCI’s John Malone would articulate his 500-channel future vision for cable, using GI’s pay TV security system and digital set-top boxes made by GI and AT&T. Don Rumsfeld hailed the bombshell announcement as “a decision which could well represent the launch of the Digital Age in the United States.”

We felt like we had finally crossed the Rubicon, the Italian river passed by Julius Caesar in 49 BC, and a metaphor I used over

the years to represent the inflection point of a new business, a point of no return. Three eventful years had passed since the company’s digital television project had been unveiled, and GI had been sprinting the entire time.

TCI’s announcement stated that its digital cable service would commence by early 1994, barely a year away, timed to coincide with DirecTV’s intended launch. But the new system, which would differ in many ways from GI’s first-generation DigiCipher I system, was not even defined or specified yet.

Some thought the company had just hit a home run, but in reality we had only reached first base. The battle for digital supremacy would rage on for several more years. For the race to be the market leader in digital television communications equipment was not just a sprint, it was also a marathon. “This is just the beginning,” said Malone. “This first round of products is the first of an evolution. We want to deliver a broad range of services adapted to the individual needs of the consumer.”1 According to The Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Malone envisioned a cable system in which subscribers have access to scores of payper-view channels with movies available at a moment’s notice and airing around the clock.

Such a system would also have plenty of free channels for interactive and computer services, multiple versions of such networks as HBO and MTV, sports of every kind, and an endless selection of niche channels. There might even be a channel devoted to favorite shows, such as ‘60 Minutes,’ in case viewers missed the initial telecast. Subscribers would navigate through this sea of choices with an interactive programming guide operated through a remote control.”

The CED Interview A Q&A with Kevin Hart Kevin Hart is CTO of Cox Communications. Cox has rolled out a new user interface called Contour, is in the process of converting to all-digital, and has been introducing gigabit speed services. Earlier this year, CED engaged Hart in the following exchange.

What’s your game plan for DOCSIS 3.1 and 1 gig deployments?

We’re bringing Gigabit residential Internet to all markets by the end of 2016. We have customers in Arizona and California already and are doing select overbuilds in some markets and green field development nationwide. We’re simultaneously working with Cable Labs to ready our network for DOSCIS 3.1.

We have 1 Gigahertz already in existing plant and are reclaiming significant bandwidth via our all digital transition underway.

What are you doing to prepare for the Internet of things (IoT), and what is your time frame?

We’ve launched our Homelife home automation service in almost every market and we continue to build architecture to better enable more connected devices. In this ecosystem of IoT, consistent and powerful Wi-Fi becomes more important and we now have a service to help customers set up and configure their network.

Do average consumers know what it is?

They know they have more connected devices and understand the benefits of real-time data. We need to help make it seamless and create a more integrated experience.

How are dev ops, big data and cloud technologies changing your company?

Increases the pace of change, makes us more agile, reduces cost through more efficient operations, accelerates the product speed to market, enhances quality and allows us to provide a more personalized experience such as via our video content recommendation engine.

What is the next big thing for business services?

The entire managed services space – Wi-Fi, telephony, network security, etc. – things that relieve customers to spend more time running their business.

Where are you with Ultra HD? We’re running trials and prototypes with the rest of the industry to make sure we are ready to deliver it as content and customer demand grows.

Does it seem feasible for a cable operator to adopt a “Wi-Fi first” strategy that adopts Wi-Fi over cellular?

Extremely high percentages of traffic are traversing Wi-Fi and it represents a big opportunity to help extend the power of cable broadband. It’s a great technology to potentially support new products of all kinds and we’re exploring the possibilities.

What’s next for customer premise equipment?

Improved interoperability between Wi-Fi and LTE, longer battery life, form and function of remotes are all important. We are leveraging RDK to be more ubiquitous.

What will be the impact on the upstream from IoT/connected homes and how are you preparing for it?

Over time, we’ll see the needs for faster upstream accelerate as people load and share more data in the cloud, and we’re considering this in our ongoing network planning.

Where are you in terms of the SCTE’s Energy 2020 program?

What are the immediate benefits, and what are the goals over the next five years?

We’re active in the SCTE’s Energy 2020 program and are complying with all the voluntary energy standards. We’ll continue to work with our peers to increase the efficient of energy consumption within our operations and by our products in customer homes. This directly supports the broader Cox Conserves goals of our parent company to be carbon and water neutral and send zero waste to landfills in the future.

Where are you in terms of software-powered enhancements and where do you want to be in five years?

There is more intelligence in our software, we’re pushing real-time changes to our guides today and this will be the primary way we manage the network and customer equipment in the future.

What’s your top engineering goal this year?

Forward compatibility, future proofing the network by pushing fiber deeper and preparing for DOCSIS 3.1 integration. We also want to use all the engineering tools at our disposal to improve the customer experience. www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

21

Network monitoring The case for strategic assurance for cable

By Anand Gonuguntla Co-founder and CEO, Centina Systems

T

he need for greater end-to-end network visibility and performance management has transitioned from being a onetime afterthought to an absolute necessity.

MSOs are in the midst of a boom, experiencing tremendous growth as they compete to offer multi-play services to enterprise and residential customers. The need to be innovative and profitable, as well as keep up with the increasing need for improved customer service, is putting an unprecedented strain on the traditional MSO business model, forcing operators to reevaluate their business structure and IT investments.

In light of this growth, MSOs are looking to optimize existing investments and make technology investments that yield short and long-term business return, deliver new services, and provide the highest level of customer experience to reduce churn and attract new customers.

This has providers looking to extend their market share to enterprise customers in addition to preserving their residential subscriber base across their triple play services. This has sparked a renewed interest in service assurance solutions.

Watching the status of a few thousand network nodes used to work back in the old circuit-based telephony world of 20 years ago, but not today, not with today’s technological advancements in smartphones, Metro Ethernet, and cloud offerings.

What’s needed now is not “your father’s service assurance.”

Instead, a more advanced version of service assurance is now needed – a strategic assurance solution that is significantly more interactive, collaborative, and responsive than those of yesteryear. Whereas legacy service assurance has traditionally been an IT investment driven by the need to monitor network alarms, strategic service assurance provides MSOs a new level of business value.

What is strategic assurance?

Service providers have begun to understand that end-to-end network alarm monitoring is no longer enough. A more proactive, real-time solution that provides additional value is required. Today, MSOs not only need a network performance tool to ensure high-quality of service, but also need more detailed real-time analytics to help provide valuable information roll-up data to decision-makers about key business drivers like capacity planning, network performance trends, and customer experience.

In other words, they need a top-of-the-line assurance solution that can do what its ancestors could not: step up and challenge today’s evolving net22 CEDmay/june2015

works by fulfilling a larger, more strategic role than it has previously done.

However, what does this type of modern-day service assurance system look like? What must-have features should it encompass? Through proactive monitoring and advanced analytics, strategic assurance should have assets that add business value in the following key areas: • Improving customer experience • Shortening time to market for new service offerings • Reducing opex • Ensuring a smooth path towards virtualization Customer experience Strategic assurance relates end-to-end performance analytics to customer services so that providers can understand potential service-impacting issues and proactively address these before they affect network performance and customer experience.

With a strategic assurance solution in place, providers can dramatically improve customer experience by being able to pinpoint performance issues in their network long before customers notice a problem, thereby improving network reliability. Being able to quickly relate network transmission issues to service performance improves network uptime and mean-time-to-repair, which enhances customer service and satisfaction.

Real-time monitoring of Ethernet services with configurable thresholds and SLAs enables providers to accurately leverage their Ethernet and transmission services to maximum profitability.

As competition heats up, service performance will be the key to reducing customer churn and upping customer loyalty.

That is why a strategic approach to service assurance has become a growing necessity for cable operators. Legacy assurance solutions no longer cut it, as they have struggled to adapt to support the latest technologies and are very cumbersome to customize. Legacy service assurance solutions also fail to effectively correlate network performance to its direct and indirect impact on customer experience.

Unlike legacy assurance solutions, strategic assurance solutions not only show how network performance is impacting customer satisfaction, but also correlate issues across existing systems, giving operators the resources they need to focus on delivering quality services, not customizing software.

Strategic assurance is also pre-emptive and proactive in nature, automatically and intelligently correlating data across disparate network layers to manage and assure real-time services based on user experience. Improving time to market of new services, providing real-time visualization of service performance and reducing downtime and mean time to repair (MTTR) are some of the fundamental attributes of strategic assurance solutions that aid in improving customer experience.

Agility Time to market for new services remains remarkably – and many cases, unacceptably – high, traditionally between six to 12 months. Numerous factors play a role in this length, including siloed IT systems and a fragmented view of the network. This, of course, remains a regular annoyance for service providers as they strive to get new services launched quickly.

Understandably, operators continue to search for a cost-effective and easy-to-implement solution for reducing the time it takes to monitor new networks and systems.

A strategic approach to service assurance utilizes a plug-in model to help speed up implementation time. With numerous plug-ins pre-installed that instantly recognize and monitor network technologies, strategic assurance empowers operators with the ability to operationalize new services with readily available integration capability. Thus, less time will be needed to roll out new services.

Furthermore, the implementation of strategic assurance will allow operators to differentiate their services from their competition by providing the best quality of service (QoS) and differentiated SLAs. This, in turn, will help increase revenue by decreasing customer churn.

Reducing opex Because of today’s increasingly competitive market, operators are finding it necessary to find innovative, cost-effective ways to maintain customer loyalty and upsell customers on newer services. In order to achieve this objective, there is a demand for IT and business process automation, continuous real-time monitoring and advanced analytics that provide contextual intelligence.

Unfortunately, network operations remain surprisingly reactive, springing to action only when a customer complaint or a network failure occurs.

So, how does strategic assurance help reduce opex? By providing operators with real-time insight into the precise cause of problems and issues that negatively affect customer experience, strategic assurance allows operators to be far more proactive essentially thwarting problems before they happen.

In addition, a strategic assurance solutions’ automation of business processes, notifications and actions also reduces opex by minimizing unnecessary truck rolls, mean-time-to-repair, and engineering resources.

All of that, in turn, feeds back into improving customer experience.

Virtualized networks Service providers are recognizing and acting upon the need to virtual-

ize their networks in order to transform their business models, increase innovation, cut operational expenditures, maintain core competencies and offer new services.

Strategic assurance solutions also offer a consolidated view of the operator’s network, services, and customers while also streamlining and automating the flow from order to monitoring as services become increasingly more virtualized.

Through virtualization, operators are not only decreasing their network’s maintenance and associated costs but are also increasing their service’s innovation capabilities and improving customer satisfaction – but all of that is contingent upon having a strategic assurance solution in place to monitor network health. Virtualization is also leading to an increased need to offer and meet stringent SLA requirements and further enhance the customer experience.

Static, non-real-time legacy service assurance solutions cannot adjust to successfully serve the dynamic, environment of the network functions virtualization (NFV) world. In order for operators to successfully execute blended service models, a comprehensive, strategy-focused approach to service assurance is essential. Virtualized services are now being offered across a variety of channels, devices and networks, using different protocols that must be monitored by a consistent, unified strategic assurance solution.

The future is now Providing reliable, high-quality innovative services in faster time has always – and will always – lead to improved customer experience, increases in customer ratification, and continued brand loyalty, all of which continue to differentiate MSOs from their growing competition.

It is also essential for all operators to fully recognize that the more they understand the behaviors of each of their customers and the network events that frequently influence their quality of service, the more successful they will be at keeping their customers’ business and selling them additional services over the course of the relationship.

Today, it is apparent that cable MSOs require an end-to-end strategic service assurance solution that goes beyond traditional network monitoring to address more complex assurance needs. Actionable, real-time business intelligence, a correlated view of the end-to-end network and of the end-user experience are no longer wish list items – they are requirements. A strategic approach to service assurance is the future and it will allow operators to optimize performance, reduce operations costs, and to improve the overall customer experience. www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

23

PREFab Prefabricated systems and the evolution of the network edge

By Steve McKinney Vice President and General Manager, Integrated Modular Solutions and Outside Plant Emerson Network Power

O

ur networks – IT or telecommunications, take your pick – are changing more than they ever have. For telecom networks, that covers more than a century, for IT networks, less than half that. These changes are happening for a number of reasons, but at the heart of everything is the increasing convergence of these once divergent systems.

Think about it: The traditional central office/switching center, with its 48VDC power systems at the heart of the network, does not support the evolving landscape. Those facilities are looking more and more like data centers and are becoming more complex than they’ve ever been. These changes are driven by the need to support an evolving landscape that features voice and data convergence, mobile devices and increasingly blurred lines between content creators and providers.

Telcos are shifting toward IT-heavy facilities that look and in many ways act like data centers, and the shift is impacting things on the IT side as well. We’re finally seeing more acceptance of telco-trusted DC power in data centers, for example. A few things remain non-negotiable: whether IT or telco, these facilities must have impeccable reliability and they have to go up fast.

One notable change for both IT and telecom networks is the evolution of the edge of those networks. It looks a little different in each

case, but it’s clear we’re seeing more distributed network architectures.

Computing is moving closer to the end user, creating a more robust, dynamic edge of these networks with innovative new technologies emerging to support it.

With a multitude of design options all across the telco-IT spectrum, flexibility is a critical component of any edge architecture. That’s where prefabricated facilities come into play.

Not your father’s prefab Before we dive into what prefabricated systems are and how they’re changing the edge of the network, it’s important to understand why this is happening. Telcos and IT providers need to be able to deploy quickly, add capacity as needed, and locate computing closer to their end users without compromising performance or blowing the budget. Prefab checks every box and delivers three undeniable benefits: (1) faster deployment, (2) improved scalability, and (3) reduced life cycle costs.

Granted, prefabrication isn’t a new concept, but today’s sophisticated prefabricated solutions bear little resemblance to the assembly line-born systems of years past. The difference today is the level of integration, system-wide intelligence and scale of the solutions. These aren’t bundles of computing, power and cooling; they’re unified infrastructure solutions tailored to specific site needs and enabling advanced computing and communications applications.

These include fully integrated, customized prefabricated facilities—data centers or central offices that can be designed and deployed 30- to 40 percent faster than traditional stick builds— as well as edge-friendly rack, row and aisle-based solutions.

Designing, configuring and fabricating these systems off-site is creating tighter integration across systems, streamlining processes and enhancing management, and it’s making prefabricated solutions of all shapes and sizes a preferred option for many IT and telecom deployments.

These aren’t generic, Erector Sets of electronics and infrastructure.

Prefabricated unified infrastructure systems realize the benefits of basic standardization, but we’re still talking about complex, customized systems that require sophisticated engineering. These systems leverage the efficiencies of integrated design and prefabrication without limiting flexibility, and they’re transforming they way IT and telco sites, including those at the edge, are designed and constructed.

Email: steve.mckinney@emerson.com 24 CEDmay/june2015

Prefab and the edge So what does this mean for the edge of IT and telecom networks?

It means providers can move computing closer to the end user quickly and effectively, lessening the reliance on telco core sites, corporate data centers or cloud providers. These compact, rapidly deployable systems support local data storage and processing while providing secure remote monitoring and manageability.

In telco networks, we see prefab deployments all the way at the edge of the network – at the FTTx of your choice – and further upstream serving as aggregation centers for frequently accessed data. If you stream favorite television shows, for example, those files could be stored in a prefabricated aggregation center somewhere between the core site and your home, reducing latency for your downloads.

Applications at the edge of IT networks include remote locations such as stores, branch offices and small and medium businesses. In these environments, prefabricated systems provide streamlined local computing, augmenting the applications commonly handled either at a centralized corporate data center or in the cloud. Security is a key consideration at the edge of the network, and deploying a robust, secure computing asset on-site alleviates concerns about regular data transmission either across the network or to the cloud.

Of course, scalability is an obvious benefit of prefabricated deployments at the edge of the network. It’s not uncommon to see hundreds or even thousands of virtually identical sites at the far edges of large networks. It’s impossible for a single IT professional – or even a team of pros – to manage and maintain that many sites without some level of standardization and remote management. Prefabricated systems

offer computing capabilities that can be managed, monitored and maintained remotely, decreasing mean time to repair and significantly improving uptime independent of network health.

Because there has been no viable alternative, stick-build construction or piecemeal computing room deployments have been the traditional, default choice for organizations seeking to add computing at the edge. Those traditional approaches are proving increasingly insufficient, incapable of meeting accelerated timelines, monitoring and management requirements or the need to reduce network-wide life cycle costs.

The bottom line The truth is, the prefabricated process is both more collaborative and more efficient than traditional processes where power, cooling and management systems have been configured independently from each other. Remember: Scalability inherently is part of any conversation about prefab deployments, because fabrication and transportation considerations are integrated into the design process. The result is an off-site prefabrication process that occurs in specialized facilities using skilled craftsmen and established workflows to drive high quality. The process supports system-level configuration and testing prior to on-site installation, streamlining commissioning and minimizing the potential for startup problems.

This meets all of the requirements of systems at the edge of today’s IT and telecommunications networks: scalability, rapid deployment, intelligence and remote management capabilities, and robust reliability.

Commercial Video Solutions Ethernet over Coax NEW

Provide high speed Ethernet connections over existing coaxial cabling in MDU, hospitality and commercial locations

High throughput

Downstream: Up to 800 Mbps EuroDOCSIS, Up to 600 Mbps DOCSIS Upstream: Up to 120 Mbps

Built in DHCP/TFTP server

Portico

DOCSIS 3.0 mini-CMTS

No external server is required

Up to 16 bonded Downstream channels Up to 4 bonded Upstream channels Integrated configuration and management Proven standardized DOCSIS® Quality of Service DOCSIS is a registered trademark of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.

(306) 955-7075

sales@vecima.com

www.vecima.com

Webextras Articles

Using CCAP to ensure the spectrum bump doesn’t turn into a mountain

By Dan Dodson and Michael RogombeWilliams, IBB Consulting Cable operators that are transitioning to a completely IP-based platform.

These transitions see large amounts of linear and VOD content being encoded in MPEG-4. But leaving the old world can’t be done without simulcasting both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, which increases the total spectrum operators need to reserve, at least in the short-term. IBB Consulting refers to this phase as the “spectrum bump,” and implementing CCAP is one way to get over it.

What subscription video can learn from the music industry

By Gene Hoffman, chairman and CEO, Vindicia Subscription IQ: As the music industry fumbled through its foray into the broadband Internet distribution model, it generated case study after case study on how to

get things wrong. We now have phoenixes in the form of iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, and the like, who have re-mastered today’s business of song. It’s tempting to say these juggernauts dethroned the traditional record store, but ultimately consumers deserve the credit. Not only did they have the voracious appetite, they demonstrated an overwhelming willingness to pay for content, so long as it streamed in the right package.

Blogs Cablevision’s legal frizzies

By Brian Santo, Editor-in-Chief, CED And Another Thing: With an argument that splits hairs with a fine razor, Cablevision Systems is suing Verizon, charging that its rival’s advertising claim that FiOS is “100 percent fiber,” is false.

The suit states that Verizon, with its 100 percent fiber claim, “has not been truthful for nearly 10 years about FiOS.” The untruth, Cablevision says, lies in the fact that inside consumers’ homes, Verizon does not use fiber.

www.CEDmagazine.com

White Papers

Business services over DOCSIS (BSoD) Performance assured, SLA-backed business services command premium pricing, and MSOs have the HFC plant in position to take advantage of this segment. Speed is available: DOCSIS 3.1 can deliver GbE, onpar with fiber-based offerings. However, most businesses are more concerned about reliability and performance than pure bandwidth, with cloud computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and over-the-top WAN (OTT WAN) connectivity increasingly critical to operations.

Sponsored by Accedian Networks.

News CED provides breaking news five days a week. Visit to get the latest news, along with links to stories from our print edition, video updates, and more. You can also sign up to have our daily newsletter, CED Broadband Direct, delivered directly via e-mail.

Sign up today!

COMPANYlist Altice ....................................................... 5

Cincinnati Bell ........................................ 6

Hulu .................................................. 3, 10

Sonus ..................................................... 10

ACA ...................................................... 10

Comcast ......................3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11

IEEE ..................................................... 12

Sony ...................................................... 11

AOL ........................................................ 9

Cox Communications ...................... 5, 21

Imagine Communications .................... 13

Suddenlink .......................................... 5, 6

Apple .................................................... 20

DirecTV ..........................................3, 5, 6

Liberty Global .................................. 5, 11

TCI .................................................... 8, 19

Arris ...................................................... 13

Dish Network ..................................... 3, 6

Liberty Media ......................................... 5

Technicolor ........................................... 27

AT&T ........................3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 18, 19

Disney ................................................... 20

Mediacom ............................................... 6

Time Inc. ............................................... 12

Bright House Networks ................... 5, 11

Dolby .................................................... 27

Microsoft .............................................. 20

Tomson .....................................16, 18, 19

CableLabs ...........................11, 12, 21, 27

Emerson Network Power .................... 24

NCTA .........................................3, 10, 11

Toshiba ................................................. 18

Cable One ............................................... 6

Envivio .................................................. 14

Netflix ...........................................3, 9, 10

Vindicia ................................................... 9

Cable-Tec Expo .................................... 11

FairPoint ................................................. 6

NetZero .................................................. 9

Time Warner Cable ..3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12

Cablevision ......................................... 5, 6

Frontier ................................................... 6

One World Labs ................................... 11

Verizon ......................................3, 5, 6, 10

Centina Systems ................................... 22

GI ........................................17, 18, 19, 20

Philips .................................16, 18, 19, 27

Windstream ............................................ 6

CenturyLink ........................................... 6

Google .................................................... 3

Sarnoff ......................................16, 18, 19

WOW ..................................................... 6

Charter Communications ...............5, 6, 8

HBO ................................................. 9, 19

SCTE .............................................. 11, 12

Zenith ........................................12, 18, 19

ADindex Advanced Media Technologies www.amt.com................................................................19

ATX Networks www.atxnetworks.com/DigiVu2Micro_CED ..........15

ATX Networks www.atxnetworks.com/UCryptQ2A ......................................2

Vecima Networks Inc www.vecima.com ........................................................25

26 CEDmay/june2015

VeEx Inc www.veexinc.com .......................................................28

capitalcurrents Advances in Digital Video What would motivate you to buy a new TV receiver?

3D? Probably not. 4K resolution? Well maybe, if you can afford an 80 inch display. High dynamic range? Once you see HDR video on an HDR display, yes, that’s the ticket.

HDR and its technology cousin wide color gamut (WCG) are advances in digital video technology that you can really see, unlike 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels) resolution. HDR video provides brighter highlights and darker blacks. Side by side with standard dynamic range (SDR), the difference is obvious. WCG delivers more colors,

by Jeffrey Krauss more consistent with the ability of our eyes, than today’s President of TV displays can reproduce.

First, some technical background.

Telecommunications The candela is the unit of luminous intensity. The unit and Technology of luminance is candela per square meter, also known as a Policy of Rockville, “nit.” The majority of TVs today have a peak luminance of Maryland perhaps 100-400 nits. The first generation of HDR displays will have a peak luminance of perhaps 1,000 nits. In the real world, for comparison, a fluorescent bulb might have jkrauss@krauss.ws a luminance of 6,000 nits, and a glint of sunlight reflecting off a shiny surface might have a luminance of 100,000 nits or more.

The dynamic range of the human visual system ranges from about 100,000:1 to 1,000,000:1, depending on the scene. Digital TV programming has been created to be consistent with the 100:1 dynamic range of CRT television displays. While flat panel displays could be built with greater dynamic range, today they are matched to the programming, which continues to be produced to align with the capabilities of CRT displays.

Color gamut deals with the differences between the range of physical pure colors (wavelengths), the range of colors that can be perceived by the human eye, and the range of colors that can be reproduced on a TV display. Human color vision response is usually described in terms of the “CIE 1931 color space,” which uses a two dimensional figure that shows all the colors that can be perceived by the human eye. (The CIE is the International Committee on Illumination.)

Digital television uses the specification found in ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 to describe the color components used in digital television today. The range of colors supported

by BT.709 is far smaller than the range of colors in the CIE 1931 color space. According to one source, the BT.709 color space covers 35.9 percent of the CIE 1931 color space. Today’s digital televisions are designed to reproduce the BT.709 colors, and might not have the capability to reproduce a wider gamut of colors. But there is a newer ITU-R Recommendation, BT.2020, that provides for a wider color gamut. BT.2020 is said to cover 75.8 percent of the CIE 1931 color space.

Here’s a goal for the next few years: TVs that comply with the BT.2020 color gamut, and have a peak luminance of 4,000 nits. So far as I know, there aren’t any commercially-available TVs today that meet this goal. But in the near term there will be displays with wider color gamut and peak luminosity of 1,000 to 2,000 nits.

To read past columns, visit www.CEDmagazine.com So what happens when an HDR signal is delivered to an SDR display, or a WCG signal is delivered to a BT.709 display? Things get ugly. That’s why the Blu-ray Disc Association asked the Consumer Electronics Association to define a way to signal across the HDMI interface when the content is HDR. Blu-ray discs with HDR and WCG content are expected to be on the market later this year, as well as disc players and displays that are compatible.

Consequently, CEA recently adopted the 861.3 extension to CEA 861, which provides for signaling when the content complies with two new HDR standards from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE): • SMPTE ST 2084:2014, “High Dynamic Range Electro-Optical Transfer Function of Mastering • Reference Displays” and SMPTE ST 2086:2014, “Mastering Display Color Volume Metadata Supporting High Luminance and Wide Color Gamut Images.”

These two SMPTE standards define one version of HDR and WCG, and it’s the version that Blu-ray discs will employ initially, but there are other proposals as well. So if necessary, the CEA 861.3 standard can be extended later to add signaling for other versions, such as the proposals from Dolby, Philips and Technicolor.

Meanwhile, CableLabs is doing research into consumer preferences. Although the initial evaluation of picture resolution was done under very informal conditions, not in controlled experiments, the results were pretty clear. Most consumers could tell little or no difference between up-scaled 1080P pictures and native 4K pictures. CableLabs recently concluded formal consumer preference testing of HDR, and the results indicate a high percentage of participants showed a preference for HDR over SDR. One other factor. The data rate difference between 1080P pictures and 4K pictures is huge, up to a factor of four. On the other hand, going from SDR to HDR requires only 10-25 percent more data capacity. That has implications for cable network resource allocations.

So you can go out and buy a 4K TV today if you want. But I think the most important advances in digital TV will be coming later this year and next, with the availability of HDR and WCG capabilities and content.

www.CEDmagazine.commay/june2015

27

Bring VeSion to Your Network

ĐĐĞƐƐ ƌĞƐƵůƚƐ ĂŶLJǁŚĞƌĞ ĂŶLJƟ ŵĞ ĂŶĚ Ăƚ ĂŶLJ ůŽĐĂƟ ŽŶ with VeSion ƉůĂƞ Žƌŵ

W NE

Cloud-based One System Platform sĞ^ŝŽŶ ŝƐ ƚŚĞ ŶĞdžƚ ƐƚĞƉ ŝŶ ŝŶŶŽǀĂƟ ŽŶ ĨŽƌ D^K EĞƚǁŽƌŬ DŽŶŝƚŽƌŝŶŐ sĞ^ŝŽŶ ŝŶƚĞŐƌĂƚĞƐ WƌĞǀĞŶƚĂƟ ǀĞ Z& ŵŽŶŝƚŽƌŝŶŐ ƐLJƐƚĞŵƐ DW ' K ^/^ ƵƌƐƚ ĞŵŽĚƵůĂƟ ŽŶ ƚŚĞƌŶĞƚ ^> ĂŶĚ tŽƌŬŇ Žǁ! ƐƐĞƚ ŵĂŶĂŐĞŵĞŶƚ ƐLJƐƚĞŵƐ Ăůů ƵŶĚĞƌ ŽŶĞ ƵŵďƌĞůůĂ sĞ^ŝŽŶ#Ɛ KŶĞ ^LJƐƚĞŵ WůĂƞ Žƌŵ ƐŝŐŶŝĮ ĐĂŶƚůLJ ƌĞĚƵĐĞƐ ŶĞƚǁŽƌŬ ƚƌŽƵďůĞƐŚŽŽƟ ŶŐ ĂŶĚ ƉƌŽďůĞŵ ƌĞƐŽůƵƟ ŽŶ Ɵ ŵĞ hƐŝŶŐ Ă ĐŽŵŵŽŶ ǁĞď ďƌŽǁƐĞƌ Žƌ ŵŽďŝůĞ ĂƉƉƐ VeSion is accessible ĂŶLJƟ ŵĞ ĂŶLJǁŚĞƌĞ ƉƌŽǀŝĚŝŶŐ D^KƐ ĐŽŵƉůĞƚĞ ŶĞƚǁŽƌŬ ǀŝƐŝďŝůŝƚLJ ƵƐĞƌ ĐĂŶ ƌĞǀŝĞǁ ƐLJƐƚĞŵ ĂůĂƌŵƐ ůŝǀĞ ƚƌĂĐĞƐ ƵƉůŽĂĚĞĚ ƚĞƐƚ ƌĞƐƵůƚƐ ĂŶĚ ƉĞƌĨŽƌŵ ŽŶ ĚĞŵĂŶĚ ƚĞƐƚƐ ĂƐ ƌĞƋƵŝƌĞĚ ŽŶƚĂĐƚ ƵƐ ƚŽ ďƌŝŶŐ sĞ^ŝŽŶ ƚŽ LJŽƵƌ ŶĞƚǁŽƌŬ

T h e Ver i fic ation Ex perts

Website: www.veexinc.com Email: info@veexinc.com Tel: +1.510.651.0500 Fax: +1.510.651.0505

CaTV solutions