THE SEMINARS KICKED OFF with the very articulate futurist Jim Carroll, an international expert on trends and innovation and an "informed" Rogers customer.
His view is convergence was talked about during the 1990s but is now for real. He likened "convergence" to "teenage sex" — "not sure what it is but everyone says they are doing it". Today he says service providers are facing a completely different customer. Today’s younger user of communications and media is tomorrows savvy customer who will be less loyal, far more demanding and expects choice.
Rate of change of services and technology today and moving forward is considerably more rapid than we have ever been exposed to in adult life. Witness last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Product life is substantially shorter compared with what we have know he says, for example a state-of-the-art digital camera is technically obsolete within 6 months. To further emphasize change Carroll says Kids don’t think "TV" now they think "video" and they don’t think "telephone" they think "Skype".
Another big change he touted is the consequence of world wide telecommunications and the Internet. The way the engineering community exchanges information. Engineers and scientist use to exchange ideas and information via periodic seminars and white papers (maybe exchanges a few times per year) now essentially instantaneously. Idea cycles have collapsed and "discoveries" that took four years to develop now can take four hours through real time collaboration across continents. The enabled communications loops instantly improve and spawn ideas.
Carroll’s conclusions are that the "Agile" organizations who can innovate with fluidity, flexibility and extensibility are the ones who will exceed tomorrow. He offered 10 guidelines. This is essentially how he explained them:
1. Observe. Look what happens at CES and other initiatives across the world.
2. Think-view through different lenses-no blindness.
3. Change.
4. Dare-take risks even if it takes 100 initiatives to get a winner, something that works.
5. Banish.
6. Try.
7. Question and challenge.
8. Grow.
9. Do-focus on doing something.
10. Enjoy.
He closed with "Don’t have war with your customer and focus on the opportunity not the threat".
The following session chaired by Tony Werner CTO Liberty Global looked at technologies emerging towards 2010. He opened with the observation that the cost per megabyte of memory is falling so fast it really cannot be charted. He mentioned that DirecTV already has a 1 TeraB digital recorder enabled satellite receiver and Softbank’s service development is for 100 million video "assets" available on demand. He introduced the session speakers with the comment that finding and navigating through these huge libraries of this "long tail" content is a real challenge to be overcome.
This first set of presentations explored the expected growth in memory, the "unicasting" of content rather than broadcasting content by numerous side by side "Program channels", content navigation schemes and enabling content to be available on any device (author once, run on most places). Predictions by the various speakers included:
1.
2. DVRs have 322 GByte today moving to 1.9 TeraByte 2010
3. Information will continue to grow by 30% per year
4. More storage will migrate to the network away from the edge
5. Desire for unimpeded mobility will continue to cause customers to drop land line connections for voice and data
6. Broadcast network architectures (such as today’s cable) will move rapidly to "switched" (unicast)
7. Switched architectures will enable evolution to a fully IP delivered content environment as well as fast program surfing, on-demand delivery and targeted advertising.
8. Video navigation will move from text-grid format to web like video rich navigation and far fewer "clicks" to access content.
The afternoon presentations chaired by Chris Bowick, CTO Cox Communications, continued the theme on evolving the architecture to a switched capability, all digital evolution and ability for efficient IP delivery of multi-media (Video, data, voice) content.
Many of the predictions mirrored those of the morning speakers. John Carlucci, Chief Network Architect Time Warner offered an interesting set of "Laws to Inspire Growth" that need to be considered as we evolve our networks and services.
1. Moore’s Law: IC density doubles every 2 years
2. Gilder’s Law: Bandwidth doubles every 6 months
3. Kryder’s Law: Storage density doubles every year
4. Gigabit Ethernet transport and switching capability improves 800% over 3 years for same cost
Emerging technologies such as the displacement of physical conditional access (service authorization) in set-top-boxes and CableCards by DCAS (downloadable conditional access), advanced statistical multiplexing (using the statistical probabilities of the video content to pack more program delivery within a cable channel(s)), advanced digital compression protocols such as MPEG-4 and migration to IP delivery of video formed the bulk of the presentations.
Speaker Harsh Parandekar Software Development Manager Cisco Systems also gave a comprehensive overview on the evolution of today’s DOCSIS high speed data delivery to the modularized architecture for supporting DOCSIS 3.0 with capability of downloading speeds exceeding 1Gbps and full IP delivery of the cable video services.
Nick Hamilton-Piercy is the former CTO at Rogers Communications and now works as a company advisor. He is in Tampa covering the SCTE Emerging Technologies conference for www.cartt.ca
