Media Experiences 2 Go

Earlier this week Time Warner announced it was ending a trial that allowed subscribers to watch cable television on their PCs. Aside the from the question of why you’d want to watch TV on your PC rather than your… um… TV, the test brought up an interesting technical dilemma. Time Warner converted its content to IP packets by installing a transcoder (at the headend?) for every channel. (75 channels to be exact.) Moreover, to scale the system, Time Warner would have had to add 75 transcoders in every single advertising system. Not particularly feasible.

Some day everything will be IP-based, but until then, transcoding content across different platforms will continue to be an issue. The video delivery platform for the Internet is very different from the video delivery platform of most existing cable infrastructures. While there may not be much compelling reason to watch cable TV on a PC, Internet TV via a cable network is another matter. As an example, Comcast recently announced a deal through partner Ziddio.com to make available select Facebook videos through its on-demand service. Since the videos will initially upload via the Internet, I’m assuming some sort of transcoding will have to take place to make them available through a cable TV network. (Though stored content for on-demand service is probably easier to deal with than live TV)

Transcoding also goes beyond the IP-to-non-IP conversion equation. Transcoding could be key in making rights management systems more user-friendly. The example here is Downloadable Conditional Access Systems (DCAS) for cable. When it’s implemented, DCAS will act as a mechanism for transcoding conditional access code (a rights management scheme) in millions of cable households at once. This means that no matter what set-top (or other cable-enabled hardware) is in a user’s house, it will work with the CA system the regional cable headend has employed.

The point here is that transcoding can be impractical or incredibly useful. I don’t know if there’s a solution to the problem Time Warner faced, but transcoding is both feasible and scaleable in other situations - when you’re not talking about converting live video, but working with finite recorded content, or simply decoding the rights-management wrapper around protected programs.