Unlimited HD Video, Forever

Transcription

1 HOW THE FCC S EXPERIMENTAL GRANT CAN CHANGE THE RURAL GAME p.22 Number 002 TransmitMagazine.com SHUTTERSTOCK Unlimited HD Video, Forever Toronto s Adara Brings Switched IP Video Innovations To Independent Operators p.12 Be A Giant: How Thinking Globally Can Help Rural Telcos Compete Locally p.18 RUNNING SIDEWAYS The Next Fiber Optic Boom Will Be From The Wall To The Desk p.8 INTERVIEW: Viamedia s Mark Lieberman On Election Season Ad Sales p.6

2 Cable TV s Game-Changer Enabling INFINITE HD and 1Gbps DOCSIS speed to rival FTTH...and operator-branded Next-Gen UI Do your video services consume greater than 80% of your spectrum bandwidth yet contribute less than 30% of your business gross margin? What if you could cap your video bandwidth, FOREVER to just 15%-20% of your spectrum and enable an INFINITE channel line-up without compromising video quality so that the balance of your spectrum could be dedicated to DOCSIS expansion? That s the power of new Switched IP Video (SIPV) technology, and that s just one of the many compelling elements of Adara s game-changing solution. Watch this short video to learn how you can change your game. ADARA TECHNOLOGIES INC. USA: 793 Center Street #190, Lewiston, NY, Canada: 2425 Matheson Blvd. East, 8th Floor, Mississauga, ON, L4W 5K ADARA (23272) vpsales@adara-tech.com

3 SHUTTERSTOCK Infinite HD Channels, Forever Adara leverages IP switching to help independent cable systems compete in the content race Rex Porter Technical Editor, Transmit magazine Iwasn t too impressed when I read that Comcast, Time Warner and Charter are planning to deploy 1Gbps services downstream to select segments of their footprints. It s recent news that AT&T and Google have made the same moves in certain major cities. My provider, Cox, made the same announcement earlier this year. I expect the biggest players to keep up with parts of the world, like South Korea, that have much faster speeds than we do. Then, I learned that Suddenlink the ninth largest provider by area (with about 5.7 million subs) was making headway in launching the same 1Gbps service to all of their footprint in 16 states. I began to wonder about 1Gbps service for the smaller Tier Ones, Twos and Threes. But I didn t wait for too long: Cass Cable TV issued a press release claiming that it now has the capacity to serve their customers with more HD channels than satellite or phone company providers. Cass Cable is a triple-play service provider with approximately 16,000 subscribers in Central Illinois, and they report that both the CAPEX and the OPEX for their Switched IP Video (SIPV) is less than one-tenth that of a DTA approach. Cass chose Toronto-based Adara Technologies, whose solution included a suite of online utilities and diagnostic and reporting tools that boast many incremental benefits for an operator. Lance Allen, Chief Technical Officer for Cass, says The [online] utilities came as a very pleasant surprise. They will certainly have a significant impact on our service levels and operating costs, especially in reduced truck rolls and MTTR, as well helping to avoid trouble calls altogether through proactive problem detection and resolution. In the Editor s Corner of Fierce Cable, the question was raised, Are Cable Operators making fiber-fueled overpromises based on DOCSIS 3.0? Marty Davidson, VP of Engineering for SCTE, answered the question with solid support for bonding channels needed to achieve 1 Gbps speed. Enter Adara I contacted Adara s CEO and Co-Founder, Joseph Nucara to find out how Cass and Adara were able to out-distance competitors with such without huge costs to the Cass bottom line. Nucara and his staff had just recently given a slide presentation to the ACA board members during the Independent Show in Kansas City and he used these same slides during our discussion. Nucara said Adara gets a lot of calls from Independent operators, on which Adara focuses entirely. In that exclusive focus, they work with Tier Twos, Threes and Fours to sponsor events, like round-tables to discuss solutions to their business challenges. More specifically, that conversation starts with challenges related to their triple-play offerings. Said Nucara, More recently, the calls we ve had tend to focus on the Internet portion of their business. And even though we primarily focus on the video portion and offer video solutions, it s [Adara s involvement with Internet access] sort of an excerpt from the many, many conversations we ve had with operators in the past, especially the last twelve months. They are concerned that gigabit service is beginning to become table stakes for Internet service providers and Independent operators. TECHNOLOGY 13

4 INFINITE HD CHANNELS, FOREVER As of July 15, there were already 55 gigabit-level providers in the U.S. and that number is increasing rapidly. Nucara believes that Adara can help Tier Twos down solve that challenge. Explains Nucara, Video bandwidth sprawl is limiting systems DOCSIS expansion so that the typical operator finds them selves dedicating 75 to 85 percent of bandwidth to video, even though video represents maybe only 30 percent of their gross margin. So that whole ratio is upside down now. Further, every time they make some kind of bandwidth reclamation effort the results only last for 6 to 24 months and it s usually closer to the 6 than the 24. An engineer says I ve got 50 analog channels I can reclaim, rolls out tens of thousands of DTAs (digital television adapters), and I ve got 50 more analog slots to dedicate to digital. After the 2-to-3 year execution, systems have added about 100 HD channels which is great but their system is full again. Six months later, they need more space. The same holds true when migrating from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. These are just band-aid solutions, Nucara says, and the bandwidth continues to be upside down for them. Every time they again want to reclaim some bandwidth for DOCSIS expansion, the sprawl continues There s more HDs required, 4K starts coming down the pike but sprawl continues to represent a minor portion of the business income. But hasn t the need to multiply bandwidth been a problem all along? It has, Nucara quickly replied, But it has gotten a lot worse recently because the ability to get to 1Gbps service requires four to eight channels in the spectrum that are already dedicated. Operators are trying to get to a stage in DOCSIS 3.1 when the technology to bond or more channels will allow them to offer not just 50Mbs or 100Mbs, but 1Gbps or beyond. Even if DOCSIS 3.1 and the channel bonding chip sets were available which they are not operators don t have enough slots in their spectrum to get to the downstream promised land because the channels are being consumed by video. Most of the Independents are at DOCSIS 2.0, upgrading to 3.x. The ability to make massive upgrades in CMTS is only the beginning of the whole effort. Even the Tier One operators are mostly rolling out cable modems and gateways that have only channel bonding capability. User Interfaces As offerings become more numerous and complex, the need to rethink user interfaces has grown. Customers must find what they want before they can use it. Plus, the more services a customer uses more often, the less churn a system will face, and the more upsell opportunities it will have. It all contributes to a more successful customer experience. Most people think that means just a better guide for their digital TV, but it goes beyond that. For Adara, it means the whole experience the operator is able to present to their customers. Interestingly, the easiest part skinning the user interface with the cable system s branding is at the top of the list. Cable operators like to see my brand on the screen at all times. It s all well and good, but good marketers will remember that no customer cares as much about your logo as the marketer does. Good technology is good branding, and the value of a good user interface can make or break technology adoption. (Think Apple.) For example, in a typical on-screen user interface (or guide), the subscriber is faced with grid after grid of channels and corresponding shows and show times. An improved UI like that made possible by technology like Adara s can actually show multiple thumbnail broadcasts of the several shows side-by-side and even sort them by categories, like Sports allowing subscribers to identify and compare available shows much more easily than they can scan and sample text-only grids. 14 TRANSMITMAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 002

5 INFINITE HD CHANNELS, FOREVER Jargon CAPEX & OPEX: Capital expenditure and operating expenditure; generally-speaking the money a business spends on the acquisition and maintenance of assets, and the money it spends turning inventory (as well as depreciation). DTA: Digital television adapter; generally, set-top converter boxes. MTTR: Mean time to repair; generally, the average lenght of time before an asset or asset type incurs maintenance costs. DOCSIS: Data Over Cable Service Interface; engineering standards that permit high-speed data transfer (broadband) over cable TV systems. Though not in wide circulation, DOCSIS 3.1 allows for a minimum 10 Gbit/s downstream and 1 Gbit/s up. CONTENT DELIVERY NET- WORK (CDN): Large distributed systems of servers deployed in multiple data centers. CDNs are designed to get large amounts of data to particular users as quickly and accurately as possible. CDNs are distributed to enhance performance across a geographic area. OVER-THE-TOP: OTT, for short. over-the-top content refers to audio and video delivered over the Internet without the cable operator s direct involvement or responsibility, even if the operator is aware of the data flowing over their network. Netflix and Hulu are two primary examples of OTT. QAM CHANNEL: Quadrature amplitude modulation is a modulation scheme that conveys two analog signals or two digital bitstreams by shifting the amplitude of the signals/ streams 90 out of phase with each other. IPTV If smaller systems want to offer Multiscreen TV Everywhere and dedicated, branded Over-the-Top (OTT) content, IPTV, or Video over IP, is the way to go. Some Tier Ones have spent millions of dollars overbuilding with fiber, a brand new video control plane and video back office, only to get stuck at the end trying to make up the cost. But Independent operators don t have $20 million to spend gambling at the content provider table, nor multiple product development teams. If the goal is to deliver more video, Nucara believes that there is a better way that is accessible even to independent operators who are still running HFC plants: Switched IP Video. We took the best aspects of Switched Digital Video which is very well-proven from a technological standpoint, and added a few other essential nutrients so that it completely eliminates the complexity that was one of SDV s original issues. We ve also developed other features for our Switched IP Video that reduces costs and puts it within reach of sub-tier One operators. Adara s Hardware How does it all happen? I asked Nucara if their solution is cloud-based, or if it s a local implementation. It depends on the innovation, he says. For example, for TV Everywhere 3.0, there s some headend equipment that gets added, the back office is already in our facility and then there s content delivery network (CDN) software that gets added in the consumer s home attached to the gateway. If they re streaming to an Apple device there s an ios client that gets downloaded onto the device. Some independent cable operators were asking us early on how it was that AT&T U-verse delivers 300 channels to their customers over twisted pair. You see, AT&T s network still only has a small percent of its subs covered by fiber-to-thehome (FTTH). A lot of it is still twistedpair, which has a very thin access layer; yet they re delivering more HD channels than competing small cable operators that built out more robust FTTH systems. These independents aren t able to deliver as many HD channels in spite of the bigger pipe because their bandwidth is full. HD channels are table stakes. You can t stay in the game without them. But, broadcasting video comes with costs that drive down margins for HD offerings. Switched IP Video allows systems to deliver as many HD channels as they like, without the high cost of infrastructure, thereby correcting HD s ROI. AT&T U-verse has to switch their entire line-up, which is still multi-cast. They can t broadcast everything to everyone because they don t have enough bandwidth. On the other hand, independents got used to being able to go from 550 to 750 to 875 to 1Gig frequencies. Those are finally running out. We marry these two things together the efficiency of Switched IP Video with the large access pipe that the independent cable operators have, and we get what is essentially infinite channel line-up capability. With Switched IP Video, we can ensure that only a few QAM channels or analog channels let s say 16 to 24 channel slots that represent only 15 to 20 percent of the actual RF spectrum are all that an operator will ever need to dedicate to delivering HD video. Then, you re no longer dedicating 80 percent of your bandwidth to 30 percent of your gross margin. And that provides enough bandwidth for infinite HD, infinite 4k and infinite channel line-ups within only 15 to 20 percent of the bandwidth. According to Nucara, about 50 percent of Tier Twos, Threes and Fours still haven t started their reclamations yet, and could still save a lot of money and avoid system disruptions with Adara s technology. Even those that already started their reclamation efforts will eventually need Switched IP Video. It s a lot easier to be at that fork in the road, and be able to decide whether to spend enormous sums, or to cut a much smaller check and get a thousand times more for their money. 16 TRANSMITMAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 002