BACK IN 1998, WHEN everyone in cable was talking about video on demand and no one was doing anything about it yet, Yvette Gordon-Kanouff was it’s champion. She knew it would work.
She wrote the seminal paper on the subject that year for her employer, SeaChange, which laid out an attractive VOD business case for any operator looking to launch the service. That paper was cited often (sometimes even by SeaChange competitors) for a number of years.
Now, VOD is almost pervasive. Most North Americans with a big-city cable provider can get some type of video on demand in their homes via their digital set top box, be it free, just movies, or movies and television and anime and so on. Gordon-Kanouff sees a day in the not too distant future where there are tens of thousands of hours of content available for viewing and people can almost program what they want to watch when they want to watch it.
It’s personal TV, she says. A TV environment where everything is on demand.
In demand, is something that Gordon-Kanouff is used to being. This year even more so, since she has been elected chair of the board of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers. In the male-dominated field of cable technology, she is the first woman to hold the gavel. It’s something she’s proud of. 
For more on VOD and personal TV – and on the SCTE, too, read the edited transcript of www.cartt.ca’s editor and publisher Greg O’Brien’s chat with SeaChange’s senior vice-president of strategic planning Yvette Gordon-Kanouff (right) last week in San Antonio during the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.
Greg O’Brien: As the new chair of the board, and first woman, can you talk a little bit about the SCTE first of all? Where do you see the organization going under your leadership?
Yvette Gordon-Kanouff: The most important thing to me is to make sure that the SCTE adds value for its members. So, as far as retention of membership, as far as expansion of membership, it all comes back down to the SCTE being able to provide leadership in information of new technologies to all of its members.
We have a very successful certification program and professional development program and provide extended certification capabilities, ongoing information on new technologies, ongoing professional development at all levels. So, some of it is breadth and some of it is depth – being able to get to more levels of members and being able to offer progress to members in more stages and have ongoing value.
Things are changing so much with technology, it’s such a great time to be in the technology field but it’s also very challenging to keep up and that’s where the SCTE comes in. Our membership is very wide, it includes installers and technology managers and field technicians and it’s such a vast level of information needed to get out there and that’s what we can do very well.
GOB: I’m part of the Ontario chapter which launched about two years ago and it’s got well over 400 members already – and every technical or training session that they do fills up quickly, so you can really see how much of a thirst there is for knowledge and training.
YGK: I think people look to the SCTE for that, as the information source. Technology is no longer just plant technology. The discussion expanded to digital so there were a lot of MPEG 2 discussions and a lot of discussion of modulation techniques you could use – and all that’s pretty ironed out . Now the discussion has just become so wide, because some of them are around data, wireless and VOIP. We’ve had these very successful symposiums and those have been very good because they’ve been dedicated (to single topics).
But (the SCTE) is also being able to say how all of these new services are affecting our networks – and we’re talking about a lot of flexible networks, a lot of switched networks – and it’s about intelligent management and the software of those networks. Rolling it all together for monitoring, your whole plant, with all of the intelligent bandwidth network management, backbone management, the last mile management, it’s all changing from traditional field support to becoming a software environment. That’s true for all of these types of services that we’re seeing… and how do you tie them together? So we have to play a big role in that and that we help our members in the transition and stay ahead of it.
GOB: Do you think much about being the first woman? Is it long overdue?
YGK: No, I don’t think so. Quite the opposite. There seems to be a lot of focus on the fact that I’m the first woman and I’m very proud of that.
GOB: Because the technical side of the industry is a very male-dominated field.
YGK: It has to be one of the most male-dominated industries, no doubt about that, but that’s because of the nature of the industry and what cable engineering was. It was outdoor, it was climbing telephone poles, it was splicing cable, and it was just by nature, male-dominated.
But, if you think of the entire SCTE membership there are four at-large seats, excluding Canada, and two of those at large seats are women – 50% – and that’s voted on by the entire membership base. I have never, in all of my history at the SCTE, felt it was not welcoming of women. It’s just that traditionally, it’s not a woman’s field.
With everything becoming so network-centric and with us having so many electrical engineers and computer science majors and people like that in the industry, I think you’ll see that change. I think of me being the first woman chair as a way that all of us, male or female, are showing that we’re welcoming of women and men.
GOB: Going back to your day job, I’m curious as how you would rate the maturity of the North American video on demand market.
YGK: That’s a difficult question for me because in my job I’m always future-looking. But, when I started I remember going to each operator and explaining more about why they should believe in video on demand than why they should believe in SeaChange… A lot of the talks were “yeah, you and everyone else bring in a new idea all the time” and I said no, this is really it and here is the business model and the reasons it will work and all that…
I think that it’s been proven, there has been a very wide-scale launch, and it’s something that makes me very proud that I hear and see people with titles of video on demand vice-president or general manager, that’s nice to see.
So, to that extent, great success in maturity in terms of the product being accepted but as far as where the product is going to go, I would say that we have got a long way to go because I am a firm believer in personal television… everything really is on demand, that’s where it’s going.
GOB: I wrote a column recently saying that said because my cable operator has video on demand and I have a PVR in my house, I would say that 80% of the TV I watch is on demand. Has the VOD market grown, or is it growing the way you thought it would? What have been the surprises in the way that it’s gone?
YGK: Certainly the thought a few years ago was the desire for the industry to accept video on demand. It started really with movies on demand, then everyone was talking about subscription video on demand, and now we’re all talking about free on demand – and the free on demand is what excites me the most.
Everything doesn’t have to be about how can we get more subscriptions or buy rates, instead the free on demand is really the first shift to personal television, which is watching television on demand without having to have it justified by paying for a program. You still pay for the digital tier, it’s part of your service, and I do believe that’s the way that television is going to be watched. So as far as whether things shaping up the way I want them to, probably the free on demand is making the most impact, as well as the general acceptance of on demand.
GOB: What about the scariness factor from the broadcaster point of view, that if it’s all on demand, they say “oh my god, what about my advertising revenue?”
YGK: I think any time a business changes, that fear is very justified. If you have your entire revenue base based on viewing trends, ratings, time of day, and you’re looking at your advertising based on Nielsen ratings, then the concept of having someone watch something and discard that entire model of viewing trends and time of day, it’s very scary.
Everybody focuses on the fact the broadcasters are scared about this, I don’t know if I believe that. The broadcasters don’t understand what is the model that will benefit them through the change. The problem is that without trials and extensive data, there’s no way to really quantify that and as soon as we can quantify it, then that understanding will be there.
So, I don’t think it’s really fear as much as that everybody needs to know what it means and how it will work and that it’s a much more complex business model to do real-time ad replacement, to do ad insertions by so many demographic capabilities per insertion. So, it has a lot of potential but we have to try and quantify that potential and how it will be implemented.
But today, from a technologists perspective, I think “Oh here, look at all the capabilities of what it can do,” but we almost need to narrow that into saying these things will work and that’s how we’ll start.
GOB: You said that you spend most of your job looking forward, so what’s coming? What’s next?
YGK: We’ve already talked about personal television and there’s a lot of work required to really implement personal television. We’re going to see a lot more real-time recording happen at cable headends. You’re going to see a lot of mixing of DVR and VOD – almost seamlessly. You’re going to see tens of thousands of hours of content. There is going to be a lot of focus on the user interface and the user experience, and a lot more applications and types of content, including personalized content. It’s exciting.
GOB: Has high definition on demand launched in the States?
YGK: Yes.
GOB: So where is HDOD then, in the grand scheme of things?
YGK: I think that high definition and on demand, by default, go well together… Until we get a very large penetration of high definition boxes out there, it works very well in an on demand model and it could be multicast or point to point, really. Even if you want to broadcast an HD channel for use across a system or across a hub or within an area of a plant, you can wait for someone to request a stream before you define that broadcast channel. So, switched broadcast and on demand streaming of high definition content go very well together. And I think that’s going to continue for some time.
GOB: What about IP delivery of on demand content?
YGK: The whole IP thing is a bit of a sore subject with me. I don’t understand the perception in the market that cable is HFC and telephone companies are IP – it’s not true. We have IP networks running all over cable. Our backbone is all IP so where that perception comes from, I just don’t know.
It’s just confusing that there’s some perception that cable isn’t IP. We have IP all over the place. Our servers are gigabit Ethernet outputs, they go into gigabit Ethernet switches, they switch all over a huge infrastructure and the fact that it’s QAM-modulated at the end has nothing to do with the fact that there’s not an intelligent IP network all over the place.
So, what I assume people mean is “why is it not video over DOCSIS?” Video over DOCSIS is not as cost-effective as MPEG video directly QAM-modulated – and that’s logical – it has nothing to do with IP networks. It’s still IP-delivered.
GOB: What’s the competition like for video on demand down here?
YGK: People mean competition in different ways. Some people think that DVRs are competition to VOD an from an operator perspective and from our perspective, they’re quite complementary. There are needs for so many kids of storage. Some storage makes sense close (to the customer), some storage makes sense regionally, some makes sense even on a national level.
Other people look at different types of services as competition like Movielink and the DBS capabilities but we’re a firm believer in “my personalized TV,” having access instantaneously to real-time, two way, tens of thousands of titles – new, old, first broadcast, never broadcast, and being able to make my own lineups and having full control and that is the future.
When it’s going to happen and how it’s going to be implemented might change over time and go down different paths, but that’s where it’s going to end up.
GOB: Given that VOD is growing, HD is growing, Internet is growing, DVR is growing, with all those great new heavy bandwidth applications that can come with them, is there enough bandwidth? There are some companies here at this convention saying cable operators have to go to 1 GHz or even 3 GHz. Rogers is 860 MHz in Toronto, for example, but is that enough?
YGK: Yes. Yes. Yes.
GOB: What are the top technologies that you see that are able to manage that so there is enough bandwidth.
YGK: There’s a lot of talk about DOCSIS 3.0. There’s a lot of talk about digital simulcast and all digital. There’s also a lot of talk about intelligent bandwidth management, switched broadcast and sharing across channels.
The way I look at it is that the concept of pipes and channels is going away even though we still talk about it… but it will be one big pipe, intelligently managed by business parameters, by usage, by time of day, and we will have intelligent management of that big pipe. The one that strikes me as having the biggest impact is being able to share bandwidth across all of these services. So we are absolutely looking at intelligent resource management that manages broadcast, on demand, data with DOCSIS 3.0 and next-generation hubs, there are all of these plans to be able to really enable the sharing of bandwidth between services so fixed channel allocation goes away altogether and bandwidth efficiencies come into play, all digital comes into play, but most important, overlying all of that is intelligent resource management where we use all these channels in order to make it truly one big pipe.
People ask, do you have enough bandwidth to launch all of these services, the real question is, do you have enough bandwidth to get your subscriber to launch whatever service they want to use, and the answer to that question is yes.
GOB: Do we ever get to a unicast model? And, how far away are we from that? You touched upon it a bit when you mentioned personal TV.
YGK: I think that’s what we have now. That’s what on demand is. It’s a unicast model.
