Techniques for optimizing legacy cable and IP services typically gravitate towards DOCSIS 3.1 with a clear roadmap onto 4.0, yet the Japanese cable market has something very different up its sleeve to extract additional value from the country’s HFC network. Presenting at the recent Cable-Tec Expo, Yoshitaka Kidani of Japan Cable Laboratories, an organization funded by a consortium of Japanese cable operators, proposed a novel adaptive video distribution scheme for both RF and IP video over cable TV access networks – achieved by adaptively switching according to audience ratings, available bandwidth, and content attributes. Simply put, demand for 4K and even 8K video is rising hard and fast in Japan. The country of approximately 126 million people is – like…