The Cable Show – Great Crowds, Great Innovation, Great Content

Opening Day of The Cable Show '09 (Source: The Cable Show @ Flickr)

I was sick over the weekend and well into Monday. Bound to the bed and resting from my day job, I finally have time to review a couple of conferences I went to. Like the National Cable Show in Washington, D.C. beginning of this month. “Now why would a telecom guy go to a cable show?” people tweeted back to me. “Are you helping to dust-off cable networks with a bunch of old crumpled Murdochs of this world?”

I guess these comments came from people emerged in the IT and Internet or telecom world. The Cable Show was actually a hit (In think) in terms of attendance, at least compared to the CTIA. While they expected about 10,000, the Washington D.C. location drew more than 12,000. I guess the Cable Show was buzzing and the CTIA with albeit great access to senior executives at their stands was kind of slow just because of the general amount of innovation and growth that takes place in the cable industry right now – despite all economic downturn (maybe all the people who got fired now have a lot of time to watch TV…).

Well, here a few other obvious things about the cable industry in the US in general, and at the bottom a few not-so obvious things why I think that the Cable industry is interesting.

Telecoms only have a 41% market share of broadband markets in the US in 2008.

Broadband Market Share USA 2008 (Source: Parks Associate Research)

56% of current broadband access infrastructure in the US is (yet) cable-based in 2008.

Broadband access technologies in the US, 2008 (Source: Estimated by Screen Digest)

Cable has higher and quicker growth potential

Cable video and high-speed Internet homes passed (Source: SNL Kagan/NCTA)

Cable industry invested 16.9% ($14.6 Bn) of their revenues in CAPEX for infrastructure development, second highest in history HS Cable. Internet homes passed increased by 32.2% from 2003 to 2008. The number of homes passed by high speed Internet services is approximately the same as the number of homes passed for video. The potential of pushing voice or digital video subscribers is largely untapped. Furthermore, the number of digital video subscribers are approximately the same as the number of high-speed Internet subscribers. Which of course is the ideal breeding ground for the so called “entitlement-authentication” discussion.

Entitlement-Authentication

The idea is that cable video subscribers (the “entitled”) can get automatically access (= are “authenticated”) to the same content over other devices or channels, like on a PC or on a mobile / nomadic device. Obviously programmers are very interested in a secure access of their content which enables them the get a more coherent user experience for both subscriptions and Internet advertisement, versus Internet advertisement alone.

I think that the match between high-speed Internet subscribers and digital video subscribers as well as their similar growth rates are ideal targets for such an approach. I also think that none of the cable companies wants to pass the opportunity to be present on mainly IP-connected devices in the home and living room. I guess no one wants to become the next newspaper industry in this game, especially not with a rocketing 12.5% market share of Internet advertisement in 2008 (up from 10.9% in 2007) and a slightly declining television market share of 36.5% (down from 36.9% in 2007). I am sure that CableLabs will take a swing at that in the very near future.

Product and Technology Innovation

Beyond the rather obvious stated above, there are lots of technology innovations as well as new products and services coming up. Here is a loose list of things that I learned about at The Cable Show, and that I might be compelled to blog about in the future (ping me!):

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DOCSIS 3.0 and its surrounding capabilities and technologies

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COX going 4G with LTE instead of WiMAX

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Comcast choses a “light” version of Motorola’s Privacy Mode encryption system, with the SCTE 52 data encryption standard on its roadmap –> we’re talking software encryption, no hardware

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Comcast also rolls out DTA (Digital Television Adapters, or Digital Terminal Adapters) for digital over-the-air transmission of content.

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Dan Holden, Comcast fellow and chief scientist of Comcast Media Center, introduced Trick File, which renders the original spot in the background (on fast forward) and places a new, targeted spot on top of it.

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Vecima announced a new version of its TerraceQAM product, targeting hospitalities and MDUs. The new version will support bulk decryption, re-encryption, and re-encoding of 32 QAM video streams to MPEG-2 in SD or HD for digital distribution to larger flat screen TVs that are now being installed in hotels and hospitals.

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Harmonic showed me a product that will compress four HD video stream into one 6 MHz channel, based on the different HD formats each HD stream can have (1080p, 1080i, 720p, etc.)

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Macrovision announced the availability of multi-room DVR capabilities within their Interactive Programming Guide (IPG)

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true2way is on its way, as is the CableLabs Enhanced Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) – I saw lots of activities and development here, from Starz’s recommendation “bug” to Zodiac’s PowerUP ITV application platform

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Macrovision also announced a new version of LASSO, their media recognition solution that will include more types of data and a larger global AMG database, that can be localized and supports both programmer’s and user-generated / –submitted data. Targeting CE manufacturers, Internet-connected devices such as Blu-ray disc drivers will allow consumers to submit their own DVD information.

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Entone announced a Web-to-TV VoD product called “Select TV”, partnering with Blockbuster – but the home DVR and digital EPG enhancements will come to the Entone’s non-IPTV Janus gateway first!

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Concurrent as well as Verivue introduced platforms for multi-screen services. Concurrent even includes a rule-based SCTE-130 compliant advertisement decision engine that can place ads in real time and through a web-interface with campaign management capabilities.

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Canoe Ventures and CableLabs have drafted a reference architecture specification — Advanced Advertising 1.0 — which is made up of existing industry specifications and standards, along with a set of four new advertising-specific interfaces.

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SeaChange International and TVN Entertainment announced a joint initiative that will allow cable MSOs to insert ads into video-on-demand streams on the fly. SeaChange will also work together with Rentrak to more easily track these inserted ads.

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Acumen Solutions presented a neat integration of Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management service with cable operators’ legacy sales, billing, operations support systems and other key enterprise systems. They dubbed it – here comes the Telco buzzword – Cable in the Cloud. uaaaaahhhhh.

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Cablevision’s Optimum Wi-Fi Network with 1.5 Mbit symmetrical (and in some areas 3.0 Mbps) had its 1 millionth visit within the first 6 months. But careful, the total investment is estimated about $300 million, so each of these visits was costing Cablevision $300 *lol* well, we’re just starting, looking at the usage growth rate over the next 18 months in these high-volume commuter areas, Cablevision’s significantly cheaper-than-mobile-data gamble could work…

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Starz Launches EBIF App to Enable Easier Access to VOD from Linear Channels (itvt.com)

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itaas Teams with Comcast on New Program to Accelerate EBIF Deployment (itvt.com)

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