Features

July-August 2009

HD video over wireless

There is a plethora of wireless video transmission technologies battling to become the primary enabler of the next-generation digital home. There are also a large number of companies offering wireless HD video solutions, which should mean that the technology is ready for consumer adoption. In reality though, this fragmentation has arguably stifled the market. The confusion has been exacerbated by the amount of standards and industry bodies that have aligned to further delay developments.

UWB is an established technology, but one that is experiencing serious problems gaining traction in the CE cluster. These include regulatory restrictions and multiple standards, the latter which has led to the main standards organisation supporting UWB, the WiMedia Alliance, closing its doors. Pulse~LINK, General Atomics and Sigma Designs all work in this space. Pulse~LINK, for example, is one of the few remaining survivors and has demonstrated mixed wired and wireless video transmission around the home with four servers in four rooms all sending and receiving multiple 1080p streams. All companies in UWB primarily used JPEG2000 compression to reduce the bandwidth needed to transmit HD video wirelessly in the living room.

New groups keep springing up, the latest coming in the shape of the Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance, which intends to use 60GHz technology for high throughput and no encoding necessary. It is backed by the likes of Broadcom, Dell, Intel, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Nokia, Panasonic and Samsung. The range is limited though, with whole-home transmission requiring the use of some type of repeater.

802.11n is another technology that is looking for a piece of this market pie. 802.11n may remedy some of the technical issues that constrained Wi-Fi adoption in video-centric CE devices, thereby accelerating the adoption of Wi-Fi in the living room. Start-ups such as Celeno claim solutions that enable multiple HDTV streams are now in field trials. Moreover, there are proprietary systems such as those provided by Ruckus Wireless (multi-beam WiFi), which has gained traction with some European IPTV telcos.

There are also Amimo and its wireless HDMI to add to the list…

How stable are these platforms and should service providers trust them to deliver a satisfactory multi-room experience for premium payTV services? What early experiences in the field can be found? Is wireless set to emerge as a viable opportunity in the immediate future, especially around the home rather than just in-room? Or does all this scattered activity point to a deep underlying problem that is destined to forever hold back wireless HD?

Word count: 1,800
This feature will be written by: Philip Hunter
He can be contacted on: phunter@philiphunter.com
Editorial deadline: Friday 5 June 2009

Material may be edited, altered or adapted as the publisher sees fit, and material will not be defamatory or in breach of copyright. CSI will own the copyright on the article for use in both paper and electronic media.

 

Scaling VoD content

Among the greatest challenges posed by video-on-demand (VoD) is that of building a cost-effective, flexible and scalable network for the transport of VoD traffic, but also for the management of the VoD content itself. It is an issue faced by all operators regardless of the underlying infrastructure, affecting cable, satellite telco, and mobile, especially as the amount of on-demand increases exponentially.

Some of these operators have over 10,000 hours of VoD content, a lot of which is churned every month, meaning they have to deal with thousands of hours of new content coming onto their platform every month provided by hundreds of content providers.

This makes the operating costs of running that VoD platform into a big issue. It goes beyond simply adding a VoD server to scale the platform, but into the realms of scaling the content proposition. Some of the considerations here involve managing content providers, making sure metadata is right, ensuring quality is good and, crucially, that the OpEx doesn't go up in line with the amount of content.

Conscious of this fact, CableLabs released version 2.0 of its VoD content specifications, promising better searching capabilities, such as chaptering, and other enhancements. Metadata played a key part of the update (eg, certain content only has to be encoded and stored once irrespective of how it's offered, thereby lowering costs). The aim was to enable VOD to scale better as more and more on-demand content enters operator libraries.

But how far has 2.0 solved the issue for cable? To what degree have existing solutions implemented the new features? And how does this approach compare to other (ie, telco/satellite/mobile) operators?

This feature should examine how much of a problem this is for all types of operators and look at the ways in which they can manage their VoD content cost-effectively. What are the options and best practices here?

Word count: 1,600-1,800
This feature will be written by: Adrian Pennington
He can be contacted on: adrian@melissi.co.uk
Editorial deadline: Friday 5 June 2009

Material may be edited, altered or adapted as the publisher sees fit, and material will not be defamatory or in breach of copyright. CSI will own the copyright on the article for use in both paper and electronic media.

 

IPTV in Latin America

Like elsewhere in the world, Latin American telecoms operators are looking to launch IPTV services as a new source of revenue and to fight subscriber churn as competition grows.

But IPTV has been slow to take off there. According to recent figures from Pyramid Research, less than 0.1% of households in the region subscribed to IPTV at year-end 2008 with very few net additions during the year. While there is significant pent-up demand for pay-TV services, regulatory issues have conspired to delay deployments. Indeed, Pyramid does not expect IPTV to break out of its niche until around 2012. Until then, it says the platform will take a back seat and play a secondary role in telcos' TV offerings.

There is some movement taking place though, and positive news coming out from countries like Argentina where the likes of Telefonica will launch a triple play service through satellite pay-TV operator DirecTV Argentina, as the national legislature deliberates the distribution of TV services by telephony companies. In Colombia, UNE EPM has 30,000 subscribers for its IPTV service and is aiming to reach around 150,000 by the end of 2009.

Telecom Consulting forecasts that Latin America IPTV markets will be valued at $12.6 billion by 2013. Pay TV penetration likely will reach around 34% of households by that year, and IPTV is expected to account for about 19% of pay-TV subscribers.

This feature will examine the market for IPTV (and pay-TV) in Latin America and evaluate the progress telcos are making - and their strategies - in introducing new TV services. It will analyse the regulatory and other (technology) hurdles faced by IPTV operators in the region. It will ask when IPTV is set to make a visible mark on the Latin American TV landscape.

Word count: 1,800
This feature will be written by: Goran Nastic
He can be contacted on: goran.nastic@csimagazine.com
Editorial deadline: Friday 5 June 2009

Material may be edited, altered or adapted as the publisher sees fit, and material will not be defamatory or in breach of copyright. CSI will own the copyright on the article for use in both paper and electronic media.