IT'S NOT A HUGE SHOCK that the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) rechristened the Cable Show as the Internet & Television Expo (INTX) this year. That's because the North American cable industry is now focusing much of its time, energy and money on new video equipment, web-based video products, cloud-based video services and super-fast broadband speeds.
All the way with 4K
Take Comcast, for instance. The continent's largest MSO used the cable industry's annual spring gathering, in Chicago this year, to unveil plans for a new ultra high-definition cable set-top and a 4K UHD programming service for its X1 IP video platform. The news follows the introduction of Comcast's 4K app for the latest Samsung smart TV sets last year.
To support the forthcoming UHD programming service, Comcast said it will add hundreds of new video titles to its 4K library this year, including IMAX-ready films produced by K2 Communications and Havoc TV. Those movies will sit alongside scores of TV shows produced in 4K, including select programming from the Syfy channel, USA Network and Starz. Comcast said its pay-TV customers will be able to create their own personalized playlists from the growing UHD library, enabling them to "enjoy unlimited virtual 4K linear channels
Not quite content to stop with 4K, Comcast aid it will also come out with an advanced high-dynamic range (HDR) set-top box sometime next year. The company didn't offer many details on its planned new HDR box, which is known as the Xi5, nor its planned new UHD set-top, called the Xi4.
What is known is that the whole idea behind HDR technology is to deliver brighter, more vivid pictures to the TV set. Despite all the current hype around 4K, many industry watchers argue that HDR will actually have a bigger impact on the viewing experience than UHD because viewers will be able to see the difference in picture quality even on smaller TV screens. In contrast, it takes a very large screen to appreciate the full effect of 4K.
OTT video boxes and deals
While Comcast showed off its latest video set-tops in Chicago, other cable operators and their vendor partners spent time at the show cozying up with their rivals in the over-the-top video spaces.
For one thing, cableco Mediacom Communications (which has about a million subscribers) announced a deal with Netflix, until recently cable's public enemy No. 1, to include access to Netflix on the cable operator's TiVo set-top boxes (something Cogeco Cable offers here in Canada). The deal follows similar moves by such other mid-sized U.S. MSOs as Suddenlink Communications, RCN Corp., Atlantic Broadband (a division of Cogeco) and Grande Communications, all of which also now rely on advanced TiVo set-tops to deliver Netflix right along with their own traditional video services.
For another, a similar group of midsized MSOs — Armstrong, Atlantic Broadband, Mediacom, Midcontinent Communications and WideOpenWest (WOW!) – announced distribution deals with Hulu, another leading U.S. OTT player. Armstrong, Atlantic, Mediacom and Midcontinent will all offer the premium service through TiVo-based set-top applications, just as they do with Netflix.
These pacts come after breakthrough deals by Cablevision Systems to distribute both Hulu and HBO's new OTT streaming service, HBO Now. Cablevision, the first major U.S. to strike such OTT distribution deals, is also now hinting about porting its linear video service to a retail media streaming device.
What's more, two major cable vendors and former rivals, Arris and TiVo, said they are teaming up to place the TiVo software platform and cloud-based services on Arris' set-tops. The first joint product from the two companies will be a DOCSIS video gateway with six tuners. Known as the DCX3635, the combo box features eight DOCSIS downstream channels, offers one terabyte of storage and supports two concurrent transcoding sessions for processing high-definition video signals.
Gigabit galore
A year after Cox Communications became the first major North American MSO to commit to rolling out Gigabit service across its territories, the company announced last week that it's now delivering 1 Gig speeds to broadband customers in four markets –Phoenix, Orange County, CA, Omaha, NE and Las Vegas. Cox also said it intends to expand the rollout of its GigaBlast product ($99/mo as a standalone product) to parts of five other states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Oklahoma and Virginia — this summer.
For its part, Comcast announced that it will extend the reach of its new Gigabit product, known as Gigabit Pro, to the Nashville and Chicago areas this spring. The Gigabit Pro service, which is offered over all-fiber lines, is the fastest in the land at 2 Gigs per second both downstream and upstream. Plans call for Comcast to make the service available to 18 million homes, or more than a third of its footprint, by the end of the year.
At nearly the same time, Comcast chairman & CEO Brian Roberts teased the future of his company's Gigabit services by showing off the company's new gigabit home gateway, which he announced during his INTX keynote speech. While Comcast is initially delivering Gigabit services over fiber-to-the-home networks, it still plans to rely heavily on the industry's new DOCSIS 3.1 broadband spec to deliver such fast speeds over its hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) networks. The new gateway supports that strategy because it's designed for DOCSIS 3.1 capabilities.
The new Gigabit gateway also stands out because it's crafted to support a mix of video, Wi-Fi and smart home services. Comcast expects to start deploying the device in customers' homes early next year.
Cisco Systems also joined the Gigabit party in Chicago. In what amounted to a coming-out party for its next-gen cable headend device, the cBR-8, Cisco announced that it has started deploying its powerful new Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) chassis, largely to support cable's embrace of 1 Gig and faster speeds. Its first two customers are Comcast the U.S. and Altice Group, a rising cable star in Europe and Israel.
Cisco touts the new CCAP box, which combines the traditional video processing functions of the edge QAM device and the traditional data processing functions of the CMTS in a single device, as "a future-proof DOCSIS platform" built to "support the anticipated video and data services transformation over the next decade and beyond." It's aimed at to supporting DOCSIS 3.1-type speeds of up to 10 Gigs downstream and 1 Gig upstream. Cisco said the high-density chassis can also support proposed distributed CCAP architectures and full-spectrum video convergence, as well as software-defined networking (SDN).
The long-awaited rollout of the cBR-8 could certainly not come too soon for Cisco. Both Arris and upstart Casa Systems have been rapidly gaining market share on the large equipment vendor in the CCAP/CMTS space, which it once dominated, because they brought out their CCAP chasses earlier.
