Motorola has worked in conjunction with Microsoft for many IPTV deployments, both in providing IP set-tops and in doing back-office integration with Microsoft Mediaroom and Motorola’s CCE software. However, today there’s a press release out announcing a more formalized relationship. Motorola is now officially providing systems integration support for Mediaroom deployments.
While an IT services contract doesn’t sound like big news, it does hint at some of the software complexity in IPTV delivery, particularly as operators add increasingly more content and consumer services. Actually, the issue isn’t really one of IP delivery; it’s relevant for any kind of TV offering. Cable industry folks were discussing the same challenges in content and service management and back-office integration at the recent SCTE show. Television used to be so straight forward. Those days are long gone.
Much of the television industry’s focus right now is on how to move content around – whether through multi-room DVR, TV Everywhere initiatives, or device-to-device transfers. However, there’s a corollary issue that’s also being explored: how to move user navigation features around to different devices. Let’s say you can access the content on your DVR from a mobile phone. Does that mean you can access and control the set-top’s user interface directly as well? Or do you need to jury-rig that part of the operation?
At SCTE last week, I started to hear more about the CEA standard, CEA-2014 (also referred to as just CE-2014). According to the CEA website, the standard “defines the necessary mechanisms to allow a user interface to be remotely displayed on and controlled by devices or control points other than the one hosting the logic.” However, I thought someone in the Cable-Tec Expo opening session defined it better in context. I believe it was Charter CTO Marwan Fawaz who described MoCA as the physical in-home network, DLNA as the networking standard that allows device discovery, and CE-2014 as the standard that moves navigation around to different devices.
So far no one has implemented CE-2014, and a quick survey of industry friends suggests there hasn’t been much movement in the last year. However, I heard the topic come up more than once at last week’s show. Perhaps it’s something to watch out for in 2010.
Motorola has passed another milestone: one million video-on-demand streams shipped globally. By my count, there are only two or three other companies who can claim that volume, which makes Motorola one of the top VOD server providers on the planet. The company’s customer list also seems to bear that out, with big-name MSOs on board including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter, UPC, and Jiangsu in China.
Although Motorola’s on-demand portfolio is sometimes overshadowed by a focus on set-tops and modems, the VOD business has not only grown in volume, it’s also continued to evolve. In the last fourteen months, Motorola has introduced new hardware (the B-3 server) and a new Adaptive Media Management platform for optimizing storage and streaming resources within an on-demand network. For details, check out the VOD section of the Motorola site.
Once Verizon added Twitter and Facebook to FiOS TV, it was a foregone conclusion that more TV-related companies would jump into the social networking fray. And in fact, Motorola had its own demonstration of TV Twitter at SCTE. However, it turns out that there may be a more meaningful way to look at “social” features for television viewing. In short, TV content and viewing behaviors are perfect material for social networking, but the TV itself is not a great social networking platform. The industry needs to take advantage of the first premise and recognize the limitations inherent in the second.
Without jumping too far into the future, there will come a day when each of us will likely have access to reports of our own TV consumption behaviors online. We’re already moving in that direction with the trend toward remote DVR scheduling. Right now, many service providers allow you (or soon will allow you) to look up shows online and set your DVR to record. Once you can view the programs scheduled and already recorded on your DVR, it’s a short hop to being able to share that information with other people. It may be hard to understand why you’d want to do that, but just start to imagine the possibilities. In the future you could forward a synopsis link to Twitter followers as you set a program to record, or post a widget on your Facebook page highlighting the TV shows on your schedule for the week. Once that information was embedded, you could riff off in a million directions. You could get and share: info on which friends are watching the same shows, news about related live events, updates on a series schedule, invitations to online contests and other activities, or even episode clips from the season so far. The possibilities are endless. And yes, this turns into a form of targeted advertising and promotion, but it also becomes a potentially valuable service for consumers.
Back to Motorola for a moment, what the company actually showed at SCTE was a set-top networked out to a Motorola Blur server. Yes, MOTOBLUR, as in the new mobile phone service. I don’t know where the demo goes from here, but it’s certainly interesting to speculate. Perhaps we’ll see more at CES in January.
Despite a snowy atmosphere, the 2009 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo pulled in strong attendance this year, tallying roughly 9,000 conference-goers. It didn’t get as many folks as last year’s Philly shindig, but given the economy and the weather, SCTE did pretty well. Certainly the strong attendance was evident in the Motorola booth and at conference sessions, all of which appeared to be packed. I still have more posts queued up based on presentations and other show activities, but for a Monday morning I thought I’d start off with a round of photos. Here are some shots of the Motorola booth, Motorola’s new products (set-top and gateways), slides from the SCTE 40-year retrospective (engineers as fashionistas), and snowy Colorado.
One of the great things about the SCTE show is the program of technical sessions available. Unlike other shows where session attendance can be quite sparse, the sessions at SCTE are often standing room only. Such was the case this morning when I crammed in to one conference room for presentations on Engineering IP Video. Two Motorolans were presenting, John Ulm and Robert Howald out of the Motorola CTO office for the Home and Networks Mobility business. The goal of both presentations was to articulate some of the technical challenges for cable IP video delivery and then show, through modeling, some of the options for clearing those hurdles.
Of the things I learned during the session, one of the most interesting was the reality of variable bit rate (VBR) delivery for IP video. The capacity gains for VBR are often touted at 40-50% or more over use of a constant bit rate (CBR). (More capacity means greater ability to deliver more content.) However, realistically, according to Ulm, the gains are only about 25% for MPEG-2 SD video, and maybe 20% for MPEG-4 AVC HD video. That’s when you factor in packet recovery. You can use statistical multiplexing with VBR delivery, but it turns out that statmuxing provides much greater benefit when used with static IP multicasting.
Another nugget I picked up was the comparative value of bonded versus unbonded channels for IP video delivery. Bonding provides greater efficiency, giving operators room for roughly two additional HD streams. Using unbonded channels, however, provides greater flexibility. You know all of those set-tops out there with embedded DOCSIS? Well, they don’t support channel bonding yet. Operators can’t deliver IP video over bonded channels to those DOCSIS set-tops currently being shipped to consumer homes.
The migration to IP for cable operators will be fascinating as it starts to take place. And while a year ago I might have said we have a long time before that happens, the buzz at SCTE this year suggests the process could start sooner than many expected. Certainly there’s a lot of research and planning taking place now.
It’s time for a break from the SCTE coverage, and another update on quarterly shipment numbers. To review data from previous quarters, click here, or in the future click on the Category tab to the left and select Quarterly Shipment Numbers. Here are some of the highlights from Q3, with the full breakdown of numbers after the jump.
Q3 2009 Shipment Numbers
Home and Networks Mobility segment sales were $2.0 billion, down 15 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. GAAP operating earnings were $199 million, compared to operating earnings of $263 milion in the year-ago quarter.
Home and Networks Mobility highlights:
Shipped 3.3 million digital entertainment devices
Launched next-generation video platform for dynamically managing bandwidth, format and resolution to enable high-quality viewing experience on any device
Motorola has been producing more and more video at trade conferences, and this is a nice one covering bandwidth trends, 3D TV, and more. Best of all, the talking heads are not just the fabulous Motorola execs, but also analysts (IDC and Yankee Group), and even some young consumers. It combines show floor footage with commentary and analysis. Enjoy.
Back in the spring, Motorola brought its 3D TV demo to The Cable Show, along with information on set-top and encoding requirements. Here at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, the demo’s gotten an upgrade. While before Motorola only showed 3D with active shutter glass technology, today it’s got active and passive 3D side by side. What’s the difference? Active 3D uses a transmitter on top of the TV to communicate with a viewer’s 3D glasses, alternately darkening one eye and then the other according to the screen refresh rate. Passive 3D uses half the image resolution for one eye and half for the other along with polarizing filters to create the 3D effect. The glasses are simpler and require no additional information from a separate transmitter.
In the photo from the Motorola demo above, you see active 3D on the left using an IP set-top, and passive 3D on the right using the QAM-based DCX3400. I tested out both, and my highly technical conclusion was that they both look good. The image from the passive 3D display seemed to delineate pretty clearly between foreground and background, which is something I remember from watching “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” in the movie theater. The image from the active 3D display appeared to make the transition between foreground and background a little more gradual. On the other hand, since the content wasn’t the same on both screens, it’s hard to tell how accurate that perception was.
On the bandwidth side of things, I learned for the first time about the role of Multiview Video Coding (MVC) in bitrate requirements. Without going into detail on how MVC works at the moment, when it’s used, 3D TV only requires about 30% more throughput than traditional 2D. That can easily be made up by moving to MPEG-4 compression. Without MVC, 3D apparently takes up about twice the bandwidth of 2D.
More pics from the demo below – glasses and set-tops galore.
Several cable head honchos got together this morning for the SCTE opening session moderated by Leslie Ellis. The panel included Charter CTO Marwan Fawaz, CableLabs CEO Paul Liao, Rogers engineering SVP Dermot J.A. O’Carroll, and Bresnan VP Pragash Pillai. Among the topics discussed, IP delivery was the headliner. How do you reconcile Tru2way and IP? Why go IP? And how do you do IP in the home? It was a reasonably frank discussion and certainly a lot different than anything I heard a year ago.
The question of cable IP video delivery is both about transport efficiency and access to new devices. The panelists all agreed that IP delivery will likely make cable systems more efficient, but the Rogers SVP O’Carroll laid it on the line by saying that’s not the reason cable companies are looking at IP. It’s the reach of IP that makes it appealing to operators.
So what about Tru2way? The major MSOs in the US have committed to Tru2way, and Comcast recently announced that it expects to have its entire network Tru2way-compatible by the end of this year. But not everyone is so enthusiastic. There’s no mandate saying operators have to go forward with Tru2way, and O’Carroll at least made it clear that Rogers hasn’t made its decision yet. Charter’s Fawaz meanwhile suggested that while his company has committed to Tru2way, he doesn’t see it as an either/or proposition. Charter may still add Web-based technology into the equation. For his part, Paul Liao from CableLabs believes the advantages from Tru2way are so substantial that we’ll see a lot of deployments. And he does have a point. For example, there really aren’t open standards yet for Web-based interactive TV.
As far as IP delivery in the home goes, Marwan Fawaz talked about several options. Providers can use a transport gateway solution like the one Motorola has introduced, they can use a centralized storage device in the home that sends out video streams to local set-tops, or they can push the heavy lifting back into the network and use thin clients at the household level. According to Fawaz, all of these options are viable, and the issue is one cable operators are still researching now.
What’s most interesting to me is just how far this discussion has come in a short twelve months. Last year the conversation was almost entirely about Tru2way and EBIF. Here’s welcoming IP to the cable party.
Motorola has worked in conjunction with Microsoft for many IPTV deployments, both in providing IP set-tops and in doing back-office integration with Microsoft Mediaroom and Motorola’s CCE software. However, today there’s a press release out announcing a more formalized relationship. Motorola is now officially providing systems integration support for Mediaroom deployments.
At SCTE last week, I started to hear more about the CEA standard, CEA-2014 (also referred to as just CE-2014). 
Motorola has passed another milestone: 
