NEW ORLEANS – The cable industry's long-awaited transition to all-IP video world is finally becoming a solid reality after years of brave talk.
At the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo show in New Orleans last week, Comcast CTO and EVP Tony Werner said North America's largest MSO has firmly put its stake in the IP video future. Speaking in the show's opening general session, Werner boasted Comcast will have all of its linear and VOD services available over IP by the end of the next March.
In fact, Werner revealed that 95% of Comcast's vast U.S. cable footprint already has all of its video services available in IP. He said that the remaining 5% of the company's households will join the rest of the group early next year.
That does not mean that all of Comcast's 20 million-plus video subscribers will receive their pay-TV services over an IP platform in the near term. Werner noted that the MSO still has a large base of legacy set-tops deployed in the field, meaning that it will keep delivering QAM-based video programming to its subscribers for some time to come.
But what it does mean is that Comcast and other major MSOs are making steady progress to all-IP video delivery (Rogers has said repeatedly it will make an IP video announcement soon, too). In another projection into the near future, Werner declared that Comcast will have 8 million pure IP set-top boxes deployed in subscriber homes by the close of next year.
Werner and other cable technologists view the move to IP video as critical as more and more connected consumer electronics devices hit the market. Although some viewers will continue to use Comcast's traditional cable set-tops for subscription video, an increasing number will use other devices and screens that cable operators can't control but must find some way to reach.
“We have the same number of baby boomers as millennials right now, and the millennials are watching a lot more content on mobile,” he noted. "I think if you don't have your video in IP, or a way of getting it in IP, you're going to miss a big part of the audience and a growing part, not a shrinking part."
Werner also cited stats indicating that Comcast now sees between 15 and 20 million video starts on second screens on a regular weekly basis, a number that is expected to keep climbing. “If we have 24 million customer relationships and 15 million video starts in a week [on mobile devices] — that’s exponential, and it will probably only continue to grow," he said.
Werner and his fellow cable technologists on the Cable-Tec panel contended that the transition to all-IP is fundamental to bringing about proactive change. They all agreed that rolling out more features and services more quickly is a major priority for network operators.
For instance, Liberty Global, which is now deploying set-tops and video gateways based on the industry's Reference Design Kit (RDK) standard for IP video software stacks, plans to start converting to HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Codec) for 4K/Ultra HD video next year. Balan Nair, the global MSO's CTO & EVP, said his company will drive service agility by using well-defined and publishable APIs (Application Program Interfaces).
“I just want to build a stack that has almost every functionality covered by APIs," Nair said. "It's a big transition for us.”
The revelations by Werner about Comcast's IP video progress dovetailed nicely with a debate by panel members over how content will be stored and accessed in the future. While it's a given that IP technology will be used to deliver the content, the big question is whether the video will move entirely to the cloud or if local storage will still play a big role in the distribution chain.
"What we're going to see is the cloud basically get blown up. It's going to be really micro-clouds, and we're going to have a cloud in our pocket." – Phil McKinney, CableLabs
As part of the debate, CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney delved into the impact of "exponential memory." This concept depicts the world as entering an era where storage is so cheap and plentiful that everything – every single piece of data – can be stored and kept forever. "The network's the constraining factor," McKinney asserted. "What we're going to see is the cloud basically get blown up. It's going to be really micro-clouds, and we're going to have a cloud in our pocket."
Werner wouldn't go that far, though. He argued that the cloud will not blow up but will be augmented by lots of storage in the home. He also noted that there are several advantages to this, which include redundancy and the ability to switch between devices and still access information and content seamlessly. One prime example is a consumer starting a video on the living-room TV screen and then finishing up that video in bed on a tablet or large smartphone. Werner said this is why Comcast will keep investing heavily in its cloud video product.
Some other benefits come along with the cloud as well, including the ability to perform complex processing like the kind needed for a natural language, voice-enabled interface. On that front, Werner said that Comcast's X1 Answers solution, which company chairman and CEO Brian Roberts made a point of demonstrating at the Internet & Television Expo in Chicago in May, will launch in the middle of next month. This technology will let users actually talk to the X1 platform, ask questions and give voice commands.
“You’ll be able to ask, ‘What was the Broncos score?’ ‘How tall is the Empire State Building?’ Werner said. "I think it’s going to change a lot of things.”
Separately, Comcast also announced that it will now make more short-form web video content available on its X1 platform, which such other MSOs as Shaw Communications plan to offer to their video subscribers as well. Terming the move an extension of the strategy behind its new "Watchable" online video service, Comcast said it is teaming up with more than 30 broadcast and cable networks to bring new short-form video content to X1. Initially, most of the new content consists of short video clips covering news, sports and other current events.
