DENVER – Cable’s deployment of switched digital video, or switched broadcast, has been just on the horizon for a little while now.
People still talk about it and say they believe in it, but it isn’t happening on a mass scale, yet. However, it’s coming. Of the cable CTOs at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo here in Denver, Time Warner Cable’s Mike LaJoie seemed most bullish.
TWC has deployed SDV in two systems, Austin, Tex., and Columbia, S.C. and "other than a few hiccups, the switching technology we’re using is working very well," he said during the breakfast session Wednesday morning sponsored by C-COR (whose products are distributed in Canada by TVC Canada).
Switched video moves cable away from the broadcast model, where everything the cableco offers has always been right there at the end of the wire. To maximize bandwidth, only the channels which subscribers are watching are actively streamed to their homes. The rest are held back, maximizing the network efficiency. Of course, that doesn’t mean subscribers can’t see certain channels or that less-watched channels aren’t viewable right away, it just means that all channels aren’t on all of the network all of the time and for the customer, it’s seamless and invisible.
The technique frees up bandwidth for additional high definition channels and more broadband data capabilities.
So far, no Canadian cable companies have said much of their switched plans, but the technology is being tested by all major MSOs.
LaJoie told delegates that in the systems SDV is deployed, the company is seeing bandwidth savings of 60%.
There are other ways to go about improving network performance, like going from 750 MHz or 860 MHz to a 1 GHz system, but LaJoie added he’d only go 1 GHz in greenfield developments, saying that technology like SDV lets operators optimize their existing plant without a full-blown rebuild.
However, for the most part, bandwidth isn’t that constrained as yet so for many operators, switching isn’t necessary right now. But with the rapid deployment of more HDTV channels on DirecTV and EchoStar, cable will have to respond with same – and that will tax the systems down here.
"(Switched) is the direction cable has to go to maximize the capabilities of their plant," added OpenTV CEO Jim Chiddix in the same session.
SDV also gives cable operators the ability to do targeted ads, down to the node level or zip code or neighborhood level, added Chiddix. That’s a big deal down here, where U.S. MSOs take part in a multi-billion-dollar market of selling their local avail time on CNN and A&E, for example.
In Canada, that time can’t be sold and is given to Canadian broadcasters and used to promote cable company services. Canadian cable could offer targeted ads to Canadian broadcasters, but no business plan or execution road map exists between Canadian cablecos, broadcasters and media buyers to do this as yet.
– Greg O’Brien
