Media Experiences 2 Go

I’m headed off for my flight to New Orleans. Not sure what pre-Cable Show events are happening tonight, but I’ll try to get a post and some pics up in the evening. Meantime, Motorola has a teaser video out for some research being released on Monday. There’s also a general Motorola Cable Show landing page that’s being updated regularly, and here’s a link to Motorola press releases related to the show. It will be updated several times over the next few days.

If you’ll be in New Orleans for the show, drop me a line: marisilbey (at) comcast dot net. See you in the Big Easy.

After interviewing Chris Kohler about the modems that passed CableLabs Cert Wave 58, it seemed only fair to talk with Motorola’s Mike Cookish as well about the bronze DOCSIS 3.0 qualification of Motorola’s cable modem termination system (CMTS). The interview is about 16 minutes long and fairly technical, so for those of you not interested in listening to the whole thing, there are a few choice quotes below the audio link.

On DOCSIS 3.0 speeds:
“Our customer J:COM in Japan on April 25^th just launched a 160-megabit service.”

On DOCSIS 3.0 in the US:
“My expectation is that by the end of 2008, the top major operators [in the US]… will be in some form of deployment stage for channel bonding in most parts of their network.”

On the need for both greater overall upstream capacity and peak upstream bandwidth capacity
“The reality is that when operators really want to begin to deploy full-scale, widely-available, production-ready upstream channel bonding they’re going to need two things: they’re going to need to increase the capacity of the number of upstreams for fiber node or neighborhood, and then number two, they’re naturally going to need the DOCSIS 3.0 upstream channel bonding solution.

So in Motorola’s case, we’re working on the upstream portion of our decoupled I-CMTS solution called the RX32 that will provide 32 upstream channels per single card as well as upstream channel bonding, and it’s the two of these that we believe will give the operator the optimum mix of increased average capacity as well as increased peak bandwidth for channel bonding.”

On making more downstream channels available for DOCSIS delivery, and specifically video on the Web:
“There’s a few operators that have implemented a one gigahertz extension beyond the typical 860 [megahertz] plant extension, and I’ve talked to many operators that are going to put DOCSIS 3.0 channels above the 860 megahertz range to get more downstream capacity. And I think there are other strategies being done by the video teams to relieve the amount of downstreams they need. And I think number one it’s analog reclamation. I think it’s switched digital [video] as another case.

But you know the other thing is, as a migration to IP video over DOCSIS happens… and as analog reclamation kicks in for various reasons, I think you’re going to see the video teams free up channels that will be provided to the DOCSIS teams or data teams that they will use for greater high-speed data, voice and IP video solutions, and especially when we talk about IP video in the future, you’re going to need a high number of DOCSIS channels to transport… many video channels to subscribers as that migration from an MPEG-based video to an IPTV-based video solution occurs.”

The pre-show flood of news continues, and to help make sense of it all, the Cable Show Blog is back in a return engagement. Most of the blog’s focus at the moment is on CableCares activities, community outreach taking place in New Orleans (yes, Motorola is participating), but we are sure to see coverage in the near term of cable-favorite topics like Tru2way, targeted advertising and time-shifted TV.

Speaking of Tru2way, CableLabs has a press release out today on Tru2way demonstrations planned at The Cable Show. Among many other listings, here’s Motorola’s contribution highlighted in the release:

Motorola will demonstrate the advanced media mobility capabilities of its tru2way platform including whole home DVR, caller ID, external hard drive support and Time Warner’s music and photo sharing application; a demo of Comcast’s next generation guide experience and our PC-based tru2way application development environment will also be shown.

First the news: Motorola announced the launch of a new universal edge QAM today, the APEX1000. In brief, edge quadrature amplitude modulators (QAMs) are used to translate signals from IP into radio frequency (RF). (Leslie Ellis explains it by saying this modulation turns spectrum into bandwidth.) Operators are finding they need more QAM channels of late because of growing demand for switched digital video (SDV), on-demand video, broadcast TV and DOCSIS data services. The issue of QAMs has been covered a bit recently because there is a cost associated with deploying more QAM channels even though at the same time they help operators save money and bandwidth by enabling SDV. (I’m hoping to have a deeper cost/benefit analysis some time soon.)

Confused? Don’t worry. The important thing to understand today is that a universal edge QAM makes it possible to use QAM channels for whatever services operators need most. In a single APEX1000 there are 48 QAM channels available, all of which can be used for SDV, VOD, broadcast TV or data service delivery.

Meanwhile, the APEX news is interesting in conjunction with an article Jonathan Tombes has out today. Tombes’ write-up in Cable 360 questions whether the pendulum has started to swing away from switched digital video, one of the big drivers for more QAM channels. I’d say the answer is no, but of course that comes across a little biased given Motorola’s interest in selling both QAMs and SDV technology.

So consider this: everyone has focused on SDV as a direct bandwidth-saving tool, but it has the potential to do much more. If operators can selectively switch on a particular channel, they can also selectively deliver different content formats depending on the technical set-up of a given subscriber. Bottom line: SDV provides an awful lot of flexibility, and plenty of benefit to justify spending a bit more on QAMs – especially when those QAMs can be swapped over for different uses as needed.

There are some very complex equations here, but what they mean is that operators can create the systems that work best for them. All it takes is a little math.

Among the gazillions of demos at the Cable Show next week will be one in the Motorola booth for the TV pixel geeks. For those who fondly compare the video outputs of different compression schemes, Motorola will have displays up showing video quality comparisons of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 videos at various bitrates. The purpose is to show that MPEG-4 delivers on its promise of MPEG-2 video quality at half the bitrate. See for yourself if you’re going to be at the show. I can try to record the demo, but somehow I doubt my Flip video camera is really going to any justice to the picture quality.

The Certification Wave 58 results are out! Motorola received DOCSIS 3.0 certification for its SB6120 and SBV6220 cable modems and DOCSIS 3.0 bronze qualification for the Motorola BSR 64000 cable modem termination system (CMTS). I had a chance to sit down quickly with Motorola’s Chris Kohler to discuss the modem certifications and recorded the conversation/interview in a podcast. The recording runs a bit longer than eight minutes: the first 2-3 minutes are specifically on the certification and first deployment of these DOCSIS 3.0 modems; the next section is on worldwide DOCSIS 3.0 trends, including the US; and the final section after about five minutes is on the future of Motorola’s modem and gateway products. (Think media servers.)

*Note: This is a recorded telephone conversation, hence the volume level variations.

First quarter shipment numbers are in, and the shift from BPON to GPON in fiber-to-the-home deployments is clear. While most 2007 shipments were BPON, in the first quarter of 2008, 90% of Motorola’s optical line terminals (OLTs) shipped were GPON. Top Motorola PON customers so far this year are Verizon and the aggregate of Motorola ILEC customers in North America.

Why GPON? Speeds with GPON increase to 2.5 Gbps downstream and 1.2 Gbps upstream. That’s gigabits, not megabits.

Wow. From GigaOM and The Wall Street Journal this morning, the Spring/Clearwire WiMAX joint venture is on, and top cable operators are in on the fun. Comcast is adding more than $1 billion to the venture, Time Warner Cable is putting in $550 million and Bright House Networks is committed for $100 million. That doesn’t include another $1 billion from Intel and another $500 million from Google. Wow.

We’ve been waiting for cable’s wireless play for a while, and with the dissolution of Pivot, this was certainly the most likely course of action. Among the signs that this was coming: Comcast hired a new exec to head up the Comcast Wireless division and Time Warner Cable’s CEO just hinted that TWC was still interested in wireless broadband if not wireless voice service.

What’s interesting is that this puts Comcast and TWC on track to get 4G wireless out before the big telcos, and before Cox, which just purchased spectrum in the 700 MHz auction. AT&T and Verizon are moving forward with LTE (Cox may be doing CDMA or LTE), but that technology is going to take longer to deploy than WiMAX.

More info as soon as I’ve got it on commercial rollout of Motorola WiMAX equipment in the US.

Apparently sightings started last week, but I just picked up on the news that AT&T is now rolling out a second HD stream to U-verse homes. Sounds like a good precursor to AT&T’s whole-home DVR service (on Motorola set-tops) promised for this year, yes?

From the U-verse Users forum:

It appears that St. Louis will be getting this profile first (2 SD and 2 HD streams) and it will roll to other markets over the next month or so.

With multiple HD streams AT&T is looking to prove that it has the bandwidth over copper to deliver a competitive TV service.

Since the acquisition of Terayon last year, Motorola’s been fairly close-mouthed about its targeted advertising activities, but today, as part of an extended lead-up to the Cable Show, Motorola announced a new version of the CherryPicker Application Platform (CAP-1000). Here’s a little background.

First, several years ago, Terayon introduced the DM6400 CherryPicker product. The DM6400 does video grooming, rate shaping and digital ad insertion, and is well-regarded and heavily deployed in the industry. Then, last summer, Terayon launched the CAP-1000 product, version one. Unlike the DM6400, the CAP-1000 supports MPEG-4 rate shaping and hundreds of video streams at a time. However, version one is also limited to only MPEG-4 rate shaping and has other specifications that were made to satisfy a specific customer’s needs.

Now Motorola, with Terayon under its belt, is launching CAP-1000, version two. Unlike version one, version two does MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 rate shaping along with ad insertion. It still supports hundreds of simultaneous streams (HD and SD), allowing hundreds of ads to be digitally inserted at the same time.

Digital ad insertion is a topic of huge interest to the cable industry and is sure to be discussed at great length in a couple of weeks at the Cable Show. Without going into detail yet on how the CAP-1000 fits into the rest of Motorola’s advanced advertising strategy, here are a few key details on the product:

• The CAP-1000 has the code base of the DM6400, which means it is well-tested in the field.
• The CAP-1000 is hugely scalable, capable of evolving with software-only upgrades into a platform that delivers thousands of simultaneous streams.
• There is near-instantaneous failover redundancy built into the CAP-1000 to protect against program failure.

More to come…