With four general sessions and nearly 40 management workshops, The Cable Show 2009, held this past week in Washington, DC, is fertile ground for ferreting out trends in technology, competition and the economics of the cable TV industry. Here are six things we gleaned from our time at the annual convention.
1. The TV content industry, not necessarily the same group as the pay-TV industry, doesn’t want to get “Napsterized.” Producers and owners of TV shows and movies say that if they don’t get their goodies online in a timely and reasonable basis, then an unknown percentage of users will turn to piracy to get the shows they want to watch. One speaker used Canada as an example of what could happen. Much US-produced content is not available there shortly after it’s first broadcast in the States and consequently Canada has some of the highest P2P piracy rates of all first-world countries.
2. The most talked-about method for putting prime-time content online is for a TV network to make content available online but make it available only to those who subscribe to the network on their pay-TV service. Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner (no longer the owner of Time Warner Cable), described it in a keynote panel session. Paying for HBO on the pay-TV channels enables the subscriber to watch HBO for free on the Net. No pay-TV subscription to HBO, then no watching HBO for free on the Net. HBO is an ad-free network that pay-TV subscribers must pay extra for. Bewkes showed the commercial that Time Warner prepared for the launch of the service, which will be called HBO to Go to appeal to frequent travelers. The service is being tested in Milwaukee.
Three things are needed to make the service work, another Time Warner executive said: authorization (by the pay-TV service); authentication that it is the authorized user even though he may be using a different device; and accountability back to the pay-TV service.
3. Tru2way got much less attention than it did at 2008’s Cable Show. Time Warner Cable has made the capability available to about 200,000 homes. None of the other cablecos appeared to have redone their networks to support tru2way, although they may be in the process of doing so, as Cox Communications is for sure. Tru2way requires changes at the network’s head end and installation in the consumer’s home of a TV set or other device that supports tru2way. Cox has hired NDS to implement and maintain tru2way.
4. DOCSIS 3.0 (D3 for short) has only been deployed aggressively by Comcast, which may have half the nation’s homes within reach by the end of 2010. The other cablecos said they are at least in field evaluation of D3 and will start rollouts this year, even in the face of the economic downturn. Virgin Media in the UK and Liberty Global’s J:COM in Japan have already been deploying D3. Each is the largest cableco in its country.
5. Home networking isn’t a necessity for the cablecos and their current network technology. However, as they begin offering multi-room DVRs, as most said they will, then the multi-room DVR and the satellite boxes connected to the TVs in the other rooms will need a proper home network. Several of them named MoCA as having been selected. One said MoCA now has what they’ve been wanting: reduced costs because MoCA technology is integrated into the system-on-a-chip (SoC) that is used in every set-top box (STB), DLNA certification and a second source for chips. Broadcom is the second source and is integrating MoCA into SoC chips. Three major cablecos said they had successfully tested MoCA-based STBs. One said it had also tested Powerline home networking and found that it did not provide the consistent quantity and quality of bandwidth that is needed for flicker-free video streaming. Verizon has standardized on MoCA technology for its FiOS network. AT&T selected HPNA for its network standard.
6. The cablecos say publicly and often that they have the best network, the fattest pipe, to the home. The current iteration of D3 gets them to 50 Mbps, which is as much as Verizon is offering on its FiOS fiber-optic broadband network. Verizon says fiber to the home is capable of 100 Mbps. The cablecos and Motorola say that the D3 technology that’s being deployed now is capable of up to 160 Mbps. Motorola and Cisco are the two dominant suppliers of D3 network and consumer premises equipment.
The article was written by Charlie Hall at Rider Research in the US and ran first in his publication The Online Reporter