RICHMOND HILL, Ont. – The challenges and opportunities presented to cable operators by switched digital video technology was the focus of the SCTE Ontario Chapter Fall Technical Conference, which was themed “Video delivery: Past, present and Future”.
Over 180 were in attendance for the seminars and tabletop trade show.
“This is a very important chapter in cable for a business and technology perspective,” said Joseph Nucara of Adara Technologies during his presentation.
Switched digital video offers a three-to-five times increase in network capacity (whether it’s a 550 MHz plant or even 1 GHz), “without a costly rebuild,” added Nucara.
SDV ensures that not all TV channels are on the cable pipe at the same time, delivering just the channels that are being watched in the home to that home. Such bandwidth savings will be crucial as more high definition channels come on stream and as Internet services require more and more space on the cable systems.
SDV is standards based, cost effective, scalable, highly available, maintainable, and future proof and is being deployed Stateside. Rogers will be deploying it in 2008.
SDV frees up substantial bandwidth, “providing a very lethal weapon against satellite and other existing competition,” added Nucara. The technology also allows for additional (and perhaps one day, money-making) applications like targeted advertising.
And it’s not technology that is exclusive to large MSOs. “This technology is available to the smaller MSOs in very different business models,” he added, pointing to a small 550 MHz system his company worked with to expand its channel selection to 520, including many HD channels as well as VOD.
“It’s for all of cable,” added Nucara.
– Greg O’Brien
