AS MORE AND MORE TV channels and data applications come on stream, there’s less and less bandwidth available on cable plants.
That’s where switched broadcast, or switched digital video, comes in. While the process is invisible to consumers, it can save up to 60% of a cable company’s bandwidth. Basically, it holds back channels that aren’t being watched from the network.
So, while two neighbors might watch the same TV stream of the British Open since the broadcast channel will nearly always be on, the Pet Network and other smaller channels will be held off the cable plant until called upon by a subscriber’s remote control.
C-Cor provides switched digital video enabling equipment and Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien caught up with the company’s vice-president of on demand strategy, Basil Badawiyeh (who was with MSO Adelphia until April of this year) at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver last week. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Where are we with switched digital in the U.S. market? It’s more advanced here than we are in Canada.
Basil Badawiyeh: Right. Over the last couple of years, a lot of operators have realized that the digital transition has to happen for competitive reasons – for the customer experience, so on and so forth. In order for them to be able to accomplish this, one of the very first things that they’ve done was digital simulcast. So, they replicated their entire analog line-up into a digital domain.
GOB: In Canada, Rogers does it. Cogeco. Even some of the smaller firms like Mountain Cable does it.
BB: Yeah. So, as the bandwidth starts getting used up on their HFC plants, and as more high definition becomes necessary because of competition such as DBS and others, all of a sudden you realize that you really don’t have a very good way to go back and recover a lot of that bandwidth to deliver more services, right? The only other alternative that’s in sight is the analog bandwidth reclaim (when U.S. broadcasters have to give up their analog spectrum in 2009) and this is not going to happen for quite some time so what do you do in the interim? The whole idea was that switched digital video would be one of the quickest ways to actually accomplish this.
The idea behind it was is that after several studies, we realized that only a set number or a very small percentage of channels are being watched simultaneously. So, if you have 100 channels, the studies show there’s about 37 of them are being watched at the same time (by subscribers).
GOB: It’s generally the main broadcast stations, plus A&E, CNN, and all the other big cable channels that are streamed.
BB: Right.
GOB: And the rest of the channels can kind of sit off until they’re pulled in.
BB: That’s exactly right. Channels like CBS and NBC are almost always watched but as you go higher in the U.S. or in Canada in general, these channels are not necessarily always being watched. So, those channels should not be on the HFC unless somebody’s actually watching, right? So, that’s what spurred the entire idea behind switched digital video is a fourth component out of a suite of solutions which provide on a unified platform.
We want to be able to provide a unified hardware platform and a back office system. And the idea is that the back office system would be able to provide video on demand, switched digital video, network PVR, as well as supporting and subsidizing the cost of all of these technologies – and supplementing them with advertising.
GOB: Now, the network PVR has been a bit of a contentious issue.
BB: But for us, we provide the technology, right? The technology is there. We’ve had network PVR for 10 years, it’s just the industry and legality never really caught on to make this happen. It’s there, we can support it, it’s very doable for us.
So, we went back and decided to do a few things. Some of the little quirks in switched digital video compares to what some of the operators are actually asking for. We want to be able not only to provide efficient bandwidth on the actual spectrum, you also want to be able to share your QAMs between solutions. So, if your splitting your service group X number of customers for a service group, you want to be able to say, on these same QAMs, I’m able to provide VOD as well as switched digital video versus splitting QAMs for this and QAMs for that., so you can’t have efficiently managing your equipment as well.
GOB: From the cable side, what sort of node splitting do they need? Do they need to be down to 500? You know 750, 1,000 does it matter?
BB: The more folks you have on a node, there’s a good chance that you’re switched percentages of concurrency will go higher, so, in order for you to be able to claim the biggest amount of bandwidth savings on the HFC, you probably ought to have a manageable number of subscribers per month.
GOB: What would that be? Five hundred was talked about.
BB: It’s about the average.
GOB: Now, if you’ve got 500 home nodes and switched digital, what’s the bandwidth saving like?
BB: Let’s take the smallest amount of duration of the calculations. You have 100 channels, and let’s assume that they’re standard definition channels. If you’re doing statistical multiplexing in a normal broadcast environment at 12:1.
If you’re doing it at 12:1 multiplexing, if you move that entire 100 channel line up into a switched digital tier, and assuming the mix of services is appropriate, then that number reduces to 8 qualms to 37 channels, which if you divide by 12 originally gives you about 3 qualms.
GOB: Okay.
BB: So, there’s savings of about 5 qualms, in that kind of very simple calculation. And obviously you expect it varies based on the type of content that you have, whether you have HD as part of it or not, so on and so forth.
GOB: switched digital is already deployed, right?
BB: It is in the process of being deployed, yeah.
GOB: Now, the companies that are deploying, Time Warner for example, what are they doing with that extra bandwidth?
BB: That’s probably a question for Time Warner. I could tell you my opinion, not necessarily what Time Warner is doing.
There is a good chance they’re probably trying to leverage additional HD services, especially in heavily competed upon markets such as by satellite. The satellite, for example, started delivering all sorts of local HD and additional HD services.
GOB: Yeah, they’re really ramping up their HD down here. In Canada, ExpressVu has got the lead by maybe a couple channels over Rogers, but it depends how you count. And Star Choice only has a very few HD channels – so there really isn’t the same fight. But here, I mean DirecTV and EchoStar, I don’t even know how many. There’s a huge number of HD channels.
BB: Folks are trying to get into a lot more than that. You know, I’ll give you an example what’s kind of causing this. If you take a look at the number of HD set sales out there, it’s wrapping up in an enormous way. And folks within an HD set take a look at programming. I’m not sure what you’re experience has been, but my experience is I only go to the 8-10 HD channels only.
Quite frankly, I’m not interested whatever’s on standard TV, because the quality’s horrible.
GOB: I’ve got a two-year old that likes to throw things at the TV, so I’m not getting an HD set until she’s maybe four and stops doing that.
BB: You want to be able to, as an operator, use competitive advantage to be able to say if you’re an HD guy, I can give you all of your services in HD.
GOB: Yeah.
BB: And if you’re an SD only guy, I can still support you in that space. So, the idea is that kind of proportion of SD to HD is going to get evened out real quickly here.
GOB: There’s been some programmer fear, with switched digital. But in terms of the consumer interface, it’s seamless, right?
BB: Absolutely.
GOB: I mean if you call up a channel that hardly ever gets watched or whatever, it’s still just going to pop up on your screen or you know whatever it might be.
BB: Absolutely. It should be absolutely seamless from the user experience perspective. And to them, it feels not any different from regular broadcast.
GOB: That was sort of the initial stumbling block in switched digital when you were first experimenting with it – was the latency.
BB: After a while, you go in and start changing channels fairly quickly to see what the client did. And in the early stages we lost the screens.
GOB: Is the HD competition the real driver behind switched digital or is it also too sort of the more requirements on the data side? You know, the BitTorrent stuff, all these heavy applications on the data side as well?
BB: A couple of things. switched broadcast is the solution for the lack of bandwidth.
GOB: Yeah.
BB: Now the lack of bandwidth, if you’re able to make more bandwidth via switched digital, you’re able to provide a competitive advantage for providing more data services, more HD like we talked about or any other services for that matter. That’s one side of it is the bandwidth.
GOB: Yeah.
BB: The other side of it is switched digital video is that by nature it could be switched digital video multicast or unicast. Now, that can even cause you more bandwidth savings. So, if the very first person calls up a channel, let’s call it Channel X, it gets streamed, okay? Then the next time a second person calls that same channel, it’s not streamed again. That second person is basically the multicast joined to that particular stream.
So, you’re even optimizing your bandwidth like that one.
GOB: So, it’s streamed out of the nodes and doesn’t go across the network?
BB: It streams into the node, all the way to the set top box.
GOB: Right.
BB: The first one. But then the second one simply joins that session.
GOB: Okay. And the same with the third, fourth?
BB: Exactly.
GOB: How many could you get up there?
BB: As many as the folks are on the node.
GOB: Alright.
BB: And the thing is that stream remains there until the very last guy that’s watching is no longer watching, and then that session gets turned out.
GOB: Now, what if that guy leaves his TV on and goes away for three weeks?
BB: That’s a great question. I mean there are a lot of built in mechanisms, such as, you know, "are you still watching?", where it demands your activity. Obviously after a long number of hours, like 3 or 4 hours.
The other advantage to switched Video is it allows C-Cor to go back and provide advertising over the switch screens. So, because you do it, you could migrate from switched Multicast to switched Unicast. And in that case, you’re able to deliver target advertising.
GOB: Yeah.
BB: And the way that works is based on demographics profiles or viewer habits and you know all sorts of intelligence that we’ve built into the system, you’re able to go back and deliver ads that are relevant to that person. So, if you and I are neighbors and you order up a movie and I order the same movie, you could very well be given different ads than I am.
GOB: Right.
BB: Compared to our viewing habits.
GOB: Yeah.
BB: Obviously, the technology is there, it’s just how much bandwidth do you want to get.
GOB: There are even some companies that get it right down to the set top box where the teenager’s watching the same program in his bedroom . You know, the teenager would get the ad for you know whatever, ESPN or you know whatever it is skateboards and you know the family gets Buick ads.
BB: That’s exactly right. These are the two main benefits that we see out of it. It enables the operators to provide them a solution to their bandwidth problem, which we do, by the way, in many other C-Cor products as well such as on the exercise, transport. C-Cor could give you three different solutions to the bandwidth problem based on our individual product line.
GOB: And it saves them from going to say one gigahertz upgrade as well?
BB: We provide that solution as well. But you’re right. I mean we know what the problem is and whenever you want to solve it.
GOB: You get those couple of companies that talk about another upgrade the—oh I thought those were over with.
BB: Yeah. So, as for Canada, obviously we’re working very closely with major operators out there… the back office is already deployed out there as well.
GOB: Okay.
BB: And we’re working with ‘em very diligently on switched digital video field trials and pretty soon deployments.
GOB: Has there been any resistance from the operators or do they recognize that this is the way we have to go?
BB: I think all of the operators right now, it’s a very valid logical next step for the bandwidth issues deployment.
GOB: It was David Fellows (Comcast’s head of technology) this morning at the CTO session, sort of kind of gave qualified support, I suppose for switched digital. You know, whereas I think it was the Adelphia guy was more in favor of it. And Mike Lajoie at breakfast saying you know was obviously in favor of it.
BB: Right.
GOB: There is a little bit of trepidation, though, right? Where operators are asking: Is this really the way we go or do we go in a whole bunch of different ways.
BB: There was some debate among some of the operators on, "do you really need—how bad with constraint would we be?" Had we done everything right? I mean, you could do everything right from a bandwidth restructuring and what services with efficient multiplexing if you would. You could move certain channels to video on demand. There’s a lot of things you could do to improve your bandwidth problem. However, to be competitive, I think that switched broadcasting becomes really important.
