Cable System CTOs At NCTA Show Embrace IP Video

LOS ANGELES -- Steering further away from long-time opposition to IPTV, the largest U.S. and Canadian cable operators are now openly embracing IP video technology as the prime way to deliver their growing video offerings to subscribers wherever they may be. Appearing together on a panel at the NCTA show last week, chief technology officers and senior engineering executives of five major North American cable operators confirmed they're all looking to migrate to IP video over the next couple of years. They cited the need to serve the growing array of IP-enabled consumer devices, provide Internet, mobile and non-traditional video fare to customers, and reduce infrastructure and delivery costs.

"We do need to embrace” IP video, said CTO Scott Hatfield of Cox Communications. “The economics of IP are different.” Mike LaJoie, CTO of Time Warner Cable, said the basic idea is to deliver all cable services to “the broadest panoply of devices.” It’s “really about converging all of our services over an IP pipe all the way to the home and making them available wirelessly,” he said. “It’s less about what’s contained in the [IP] packets and more about providing all of our services to any device. It changes the game a lot."

Time Warner Cable is reportedly gearing up for an IP video trial with Microsoft’s Mediaroom platform. Under a project called “Longfellow,” Time Warner Cable has been reportedly investigating its IP transition strategy for some time. Asked by panel moderator Leslie Ellis about the purported IPTV trial, LaJoie denied that there was any “love-fest going on with Microsoft.”

Tony Werner, CTO of Comcast, said IP video technology will enable operators to satisfy growing subscriber demand as they buy more IP-enabled devices, watch more video fare on them and seek to view more Internet video on their home TV sets. Comcast aims to do that at least partly by leveraging its fiber backbone and still-developing content delivery network (CDN). “It’s less about IP and more about satisfying the growing demand from consumers,” he said. “What I worry about most is that consumer and consumer device sophistication are growing so rapidly. We need to get in lockstep with that.” Last month’s debut of Apple’s iPad crystallized the notion of delivering video to IP-based devices for Comcast, Werner said. “It’s really a great device for video consumption,” he said. “There’s more video consumed on that device than any other device short of the television …. We need to have an easy way to get our content to them.”

Rogers Communications hasn’t firmly decided on its IP video strategy yet, said Dermot O'Carroll, senior vice president of access networks. Rogers expects to adopt IPTV technology soon so that it can deliver video to both home and mobile devices, he said. “We'd like to have the same CDN for all video,” he said, “which implies an IP-based CDN."

Although cable operators agree on the need to adopt IPTV, they don’t yet agree on how best to do it, with industry opinion split among three different basic options. Some cable engineers lean towards piping video over the cable modem termination system (CMTS) as CMTS port costs drop. Others favor using CMTS “bypass” architectures that pump video signals through the edge QAMs rather than the CMTS. Still others want to install powerful new home gateways that can manage both new IP video services and traditional RF-based video signals.

Comcast, for example, leans towards the CMTS approach. While “all of the above are still viable options,” Werner said, his company’s “end goal” is to pipe video through the CMTS. Calling this method “more eloquent and more efficient” than the other two approaches, he argued that CMTS port costs are falling rapidly and will “soon” reach parity with other approaches. He predicted that the cost of delivering an hour of MPEG-4 video over an IP network will end up matching the cost of delivering an hour of MPEG-2 video over an RF network.

Time Warner Cable and Suddenlink Communications are among those favoring the home gateway concept. Terry Cordova, CTO of Suddenlink, said this residential IP gateway would enable the cable operator to manage its older cable set-top boxes while deploying IP-based boxes and other new IP video devices. While cable operators are eager to leverage low-cost IPTV set-tops and the other benefits of IP technology, the panelists said the switchover will not happen overnight. “It won’t be a flash-cut,” Cordova said. “It will be a transitional period.” LaJoie agreed that cable will not do a “hard cut” to IP video. “You'll see MPEG-2 transport boxes in our network for another 10 years -- because they will still work,” he said. “Some of our customers don’t want to get connected to IP. … It’s not interesting to them."