 |
|
Cable and Satellite International prepare to announce Product of the Year Awards shortlist 2007
The industry's most prestigious awards are almost upon us and Cable and Satellite International will be announcing the shortlist to all entrants within the next week before publication in the Sep-Oct issue of the magazine.
This year's Cable and Satellite International Product of the Year Awards will be held at IBC on Monday 10th September 2007 at the RAI Centre, Amsterdam.
Regarded as one of the most prestigious and respected technology awards in the world, it is designed to reward technical and product marketing excellence in the cable, satellite, terrestrial broadcasting and IPTV sectors. The awards are organised by Cable and Satellite Internalional magazine and will be hosted at IBC, arguably the world's most important exhibition for the combined cable, satellite, terrestrial broadcast and IPTV communities.
There are 16 technology awards categories this year and products/solutions can be entered if they were either announced, launched or deployed for the first time during calendar years 2006 or 2007 (up to and including April 30th, 2007). The deadline for entries was April 30th, 2007.
Among last year's category winners were GlobeCast, Arqiva, Tandberg Television, SISLink, Skyline Communications nv, Pace Micro Technology plc, Harris Corporation, Siemens Business Services, Teletrax, C-COR Broadband Europe BV, Conexant Systems, Teleste Corporation, NDS and MobiTV.
The awards are open to any company supplying relevant products, software or services and are judged independently of Cable & Satellite International by a panel of experts that includes practicing and former heads of engineering and operations from some of the world's most important network operators, well-respected consultants and senior industry analysts.
Last year's Cable & Satellite International Product of the Year Awards 2006 were presented during a well attended ceremony at IBC on Monday, September 10th.
Cable & Satellites 2006 winners were:
Best outside broadcast technology or service
Red Bee Media, BBC Sport & BBC R&D - The Piero sports graphics system
Best playout/connectivity service/solution
SES ASTRA Platform Services - BLUCOM
Best digital video processing technology
Grass Valley - NetProcessor
Best satellite contribution/distribution/transmission solution
Tandberg Television - RX1290 Multiformat MPEG - 2/MPEG - 4 AVC HD/SD Decoder
Best monitoring or network management solution
Miranda Technologies - iControl (W)
Best customer premise technology
Advanced Digital Broadcast - 3800TW IPTV STB
Best terrestrial wirless contribution/distribution/transmission solution
Link Research Ltd - LinkHD L1403 wireless camera system for HD television
Best workflow/asset management/automation solution
IBIS - IBIS Highlighter
Best content protection technology
Widevine Technologies Ins - Widevine Mensor
Best fibre contribution/distribution/transport solution
Grass Valley - NetProcessor & NetFeeder
Best silicon innovation
Conexant Systems Inc - Dual Satellite Radio Frequency (RF) Tuner IC - part
number CX24 128
Best content-on-demand solution
Tandberg Television TV - zBand 6.0
Best cable video/data/voice last mile transmission technology
Coaxsys - Tvnet/C
Best interative TV technology or application
Harmonic Inc - ProStream 8000 Digital Mosaic Solution
Best IPTV/video-to-mobile technology or service
Microsoft TV - Microsoft IPTV Edition
Best HDTV technology or project
Omneon Video Networks Spectrum HD MultiPort 4100 A31
Cable & Satellite Awards Winners 2005:
Best outside broadcast technology or service
GlobeCast
WING Content Exchange
Best playout/connectivity service/solution
Inmedia (now part of Arqiva)
Remote Playout and Distribution
Best digital video processing technology
TANDBERG Television Ltd
HD-ICE MPEG-4 AVC/WM9S/SMPTE VC-1 compression engine
Best satellite contribution/distribution/transmission solution
SISLink
uPod
Best monitoring or network management solution
Skyline Communications nv
DataMiner Service Management
Best customer premise technology
Pace Micro Technology plc
PVR2GO
Best terrestrial wireless contribution/distribution/transmission
solution
Harris Corporation
DVB-T Liquid Cooled Output Filter 5kW/UHF
Best workflow/asset management/automation solution
Siemens Business Services
Colledia Workflow
Best content protection technology
Teletrax
ShowTracker
Best fibre contribution/distribution/transport solution
C-COR Broadband Europe BV
MPS (Multiservice Packet Switch)
Best silicon innovation
Conexant Systems, Inc.
HDTV Semiconductor System Solution for DBS Set-top Boxes
Best content-on-demand solution
TANDBERG Television Ltd
Xport Digital Media Solutions
Best cable video/data/voice last mile transmission technology
Teleste Corporation
Ethernet over Coax-Star (EoC-S)
Best interactive TV technology or application
NDS
Xtreamplay – Next Generation TV Gaming Platform
Best IPTV/video-to-mobile technology or service
Idetic, Inc.
MobiTV
Best HDTV technology or project
Conexant Systems, Inc.
HDTV Semiconductor System Solution for DBS Set-top Boxes
We would like to congratulate all the winning companies and thank our judges for their hard work and considerable expertise, and IBC for allowing us to host this year's event during the exhibition. All the winning products will be profiled in detail in the November-December issue of Cable & Satellite International. Below are the full shortlists. There were a total of 173 entries in this year's competition - the most ever.
About the awards
The Cable & Satellite International Product of the Year Awards 2006, held at IBC, are one of the most comprehensive and competitive technology awards anywhere in the world, designed to reward technical and product marketing excellence in the cable, satellite, terrestrial broadcasting, IPTV and mobile TV sectors. They are organised by Cable & Satellite International magazine and are hosted at IBC, arguably the world's most important exhibition for the combined cable, satellite, terrestrial broadcast, IPTV and mobile TV communities. They are open to any company supplying relevant products, software or services etc, and for the 2007 awards, these solutions had to be either announced, launched or deployed for the first time during calendar years 2006 and 2007.
You can learn more about the 2007 awards on this website (follow the link from the home page).
This year’s ECCA Congress was dominated by the prospect of a ‘platform
war’ between cable operators and incumbent telcos and not surprisingly,
there was great interest in the weaponry available to the cable industry
including VoIP, mobile VoIP and Wideband data
‘Platform wars’ is the term best used to describe the current
competition between European cable operators and incumbent telcos. The phrase
was repeated throughout ECCA Congress ‘05, the annual gathering of the
European Cable Communications Association in the spring, reflecting the fact
that while cable operators are aggressively targeting the voice market, telcos
are launching video services, and everyone is trying to literally cut the
connection between subscribers and their rivals and so take total ‘ownership’ of
the consumer.
Eric Adams, head of broadband at Cablecom GmbH, even conjured up visions
of boxers trading blows when he described his company’s launch of Voice
over IP in Switzerland. “Swisscom [the incumbent telco] lost subscribers
as a result so their response has been to launch video over DSL [this year]
and they want to enable two simultaneous streams of HDTV. And we have decided
that if they are coming after our television category, we would love to go
after their mobile area. We are talking to operators about becoming re-sellers
but really we want to get ready for mobile VoIP.”
ECCA’s 51st annual congress was held in Budapest this year and its attendance – up
60 per cent on 2004 at 540 people – confirmed the buoyant mood in the
European market place. And operators from across the continent outlined their
plans to kick telcos where it hurts – in their traditional telephony
services – while protecting their own powerbase in video services with
the introduction of Digital/Personal Video Recorders (DVR/PVR) and high-definition
TV. They were also bullish about high-speed data too, thanks to the Wideband
capabilities of DOCSIS 3.0 and its promise of 100Mbps to consumer homes.
Mike Fries, CEO at UGC, which includes the pan-European cable operator
UPC and Chello Media within its group, pointed out that cable operators are
already full-scale telecom service providers. He noted that IP technology
has enabled every platform to expand their services and they have done so
simply because they can. “Everything used to be in nice little silos,
but it is being turned upside down,” he said. “To say we have
competing infrastructures is a nice way of putting it. Platform wars is probably
closer.”
Bernard Cottin, CEO of NCNumericable and president of ECCA cautioned that
customers are going to be pushed into choosing one operator for all their
telecoms and entertainment needs. “This is going to result in very brutal
competition in the months to come.
“In some ways it will favour our competitors at the telecom operators,
firstly because of their [larger] footprint, given that fixed copper networks
have been developed over a century. Their second advantage is size. They have
large subscriber bases and are able to generate important cash flows. State
aid is also present as a factor in some countries.”
But Cottin believes European cable operators have advantages of their own.
One is their television culture and their experience in negotiating with broadcasters
and creating complex television packages. The other is superior technology.
He cited the disruptive nature of Voice over IP and how, to an extent, it
levels the playing field with telcos in the voice market – reducing
the value of their massive investments in switched technology.
“I personally think it is much easier to add VoIP to a cable offering
than to add a sensible video offering to a telecoms operation,” he declared.
Voice over IP was one of the main themes of this year's convention. Mike
Fries described it as “the next big thing” and Doron Hacmon, senior
VP for strategic marketing and products at UPC, which started its VoIP roll-out
in Hungary and the Netherlands last autumn, outlined three reasons why it
is so important to cable operators.
“First of all, you have an increase in ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).
Secondly you reduce churn, and based on our analysis the propensity to churn
is about 30-35 per cent lower than among customers who take a standard telephone
product. Thirdly,” said Hacmon, “by introducing voice you physically
cut the line of the incumbent and they no longer have a customer-vendor relationship
with the subscriber, and that is of tremendous marketing value to us.”
Hacmon described how growth in traditional telephony had stagnated for
UPC due to fierce competition, describing the service as a commodity product.
It is expected that VoIP will reinvigorate the market, especially as the payback
period for acquiring a VoIP customer is 16 months instead of 36 months for
a circuit-switched voice customer, according to UPC figures.
“Acquisition costs are much less because you use what is basically a
high-speed data modem, while installation is much cheaper because it is self-installed.
The question is not whether a cable operator should introduce VoIP, but whether
they should continue to offer voice. Either you get out of the voice business
or you go to VoIP,” he declared.
At Cablecom the momentum created by a VoIP launch is helping the company
meet its overall broadband targets. The company’s chief operating officer,
Rudolf Fischer, said that while high-speed Internet has been driving the triple-play
bundle for the last three years, telephony (in general) is becoming the most
important factor in growth and has become the lead product.
According to Adams (the company’s head of broadband), customers like
new technology and that is partially responsible for the growth in VoIP uptake,
but the main factor is keen pricing. Adams also echoed the sentiments of Doron
Hacmon, hailing the marketing benefits of being able to lever customers away
from the incumbent telco.
“When we sell our VoIP product the customer link with Swisscom goes
completely,” he explained. “So Swisscom no longer has those people
as customers and can no longer cross-sell them anything, including video over
DSL. So we see VoIP as a cornerstone because customers feel they don’t
need Swisscom.”
Cablecom is so keen on voice services that it wants to extend them into
the mobile arena – opening another front in its ‘war’ with
the incumbent telco. And Adams pointed out: “Swisscom’s mobile
revenues are ten times greater than our TV revenues.”
The technology that can launch the cable industry into mobile telephony
is falling into place and includes a combination of wireless broadband transmission
in targeted coverage areas, probably using the WiFi or WiMAX specifications,
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol – a signalling protocol for Voice over
IP), softswitches (software-based switching platforms that link a Public Switched
Telephone Network to an IP network), and dual-phones that combine GSM and
VoIP capabilities so consumers can seamlessly switch between a mobile and
wireless cable network depending on where they are.
Some cable operators, like Telenet in Belgium, are already building WiFi
hot-spots to enable customers to access high-speed data services through their
network but outside the home, and Duco Sickinghe, the company’s CEO,
is happy with the way WiFi is extending the Telenet brand nationally.
But voice could be the killer application for wireless Local Area Networks,
certainly if the figures quoted by Rudolf Fischer at Cablecom are accurate.
He stated: “Wireless LAN will be important. We have a price advantage
of a factor of ten compared to mobile phones.”
Doron Hacmon said UPC is very interested in ‘VoIP-to-go’, as he
called it, describing the combination of Wireless LAN technologies and GSM
as the future. “We are very interested in using our SIP platform to
go into that domain and enable our customers to use their voice service outside
the home.”
Sudhir Ispahani, chief technology officer at UGC Europe (which includes
UPC) and chairman of the UGC Technology Board confirmed that the company is
looking at the business models and technologies needed to support portability.
“I think the lead will come from handset manufacturers and a lot of
handsets are getting the necessary capabilities. If there is a SIP client
on the phone you can talk to a SIP client, and my network is SIP enabled so
what is stopping me from doing it apart from structuring the business relationships
and models?”
Once they are offering mobile voice and data services, using wireless LANs,
it may even be possible for cable operators to deliver video to handheld devices
over their core wired network using WiFi or WiMAX for the wireless access.
So beyond mobile telephony, there could be a route into mobile phone TV – which
looks like becoming a new platform for the delivery of live multi-channel
services.
New video services were never far away from the discussions at this year’s
ECCA Congress and delegates heard about the shorter-term innovations that
can keep cable operators ahead of the telcos – and indeed DTH satellite
operators – in their traditional business.
Martin Kull, CTO at Comhem, explained how his company was offering PVR
today and one channel of HD (HD1, the pan-European entertainment channel previously
called Euro1080), with plans for a full-scale HDTV launch in time for next
year’s World Cup finals.
“HD exploits the very large bandwidth still available in our network,” he
noted. “And of course, we know that HDTV with current MPEG-2 technology
requires some 20Mbps and this will be quite hard for both DTH operators and
DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) to find. So launching HDTV early is a
way for us to fence off the competition and show the potential of cable. We
see increasing customer demand for HD.”
Fischer at Cablecom said he saw HDTV as a weapon in pushing forwards the
company’s digital transition plan. “I think the World Cup 2006
is an opportunity for us in the cable industry to push the benefits of digital
TV. It gives us an advantage because TV over DSL providers will have problems
matching it.”
UGC Europe’s Ispahani also believes HDTV can help cable operators differentiate
themselves from “our friends in the incumbent world”. He said
UGC’s near-term strategy was to deploy HD using MPEG-2 technology because “mainstream” MPEG-4
Part 10 (AVC/H.264) based equipment would not be available before Q1 next
year. “That is when we will see product that works and we are not willing
to wait for that,” he stated.
Ispahani said DVR was also a key strategy for UPC, as it is for Cablecom,
which will introduce this service at the end of the year.
Patrick Vien, president of NBC Universal, which owns a portfolio of 4,000
films and 40,000 TV episodes, declared that “PVR is becoming explosive.” He
pointed to the power of on-demand programming over cable generally. “Nothing
is more compelling than on-demand and cable companies have to offer the best,” he
said. “Otherwise telecoms companies may be able to supplant you.”
Sickinghe at Telenet certainly believes his subscribers will welcome more
on-demand content. “We find people like to watch television from yesterday
or even one month ago and we want to move aggressively in that,” he
explained.
Niels Breining, CEO of the Danish cable operator TDC Kabel, said his company
will introduce VOD this autumn, joining the UK cable operators NTL and Telewest,
who began rolling out on-demand movie and television services in the UK in
January.
Chad Raube, director of Internet at Telewest, warned the ECCA audience
that DTH satellite providers will fight back with PVR. Referring to the UK
market, he said: “Sky (the UK direct-to-home operator) will try to position
PVR as Video on Demand and muddy the waters.”
This will be an increasing threat across the continent. Premiere, the German
Pay TV giant, has just launched a push-VOD service for example, which is being
marketed as a home video rental service. This uses a file-based transfer via
satellite into the subscriber DVR when bandwidth is available on the network,
like overnight.
The PREMIERE DIRECT+ service gives customers access to up to 30 top movies
per week, which they can order via phone, text message or the Internet. The
content is available for viewing within 24 hours, is based around an Electronic
Programme Guide and provides all the usual VOD playback functionality like
pause, rewind, slow motion etc.
One way to counter the threat to cable’s traditional on-demand advantage
is to introduce HDTV on demand and that is part of the Telewest strategy.
Raube said the UK company will offer movies in HD and, while it will only
be adopted by a small segment of users to begin with, it was important to
provide thought leadership, he felt.
HD-VOD is likely to be an important part of the cable armoury going forwards
and two US cable operators have already introduced the concept commercially,
as we reported in our March/April ‘European HDTV’ supplement (p10-11).
The first is Cablevision, which has included HD-VOD in a bundle of 16 HD programming
services that are available to all its 102,000 HDTV viewers in the New York
metropolitan area. The other is Comcast, which is offering limited HD-VOD
today.
Raube at Telewest also pointed to the complementary nature of VOD and PVR
within the cable network. “PVR is what you want, when you want it. VOD
gives you stuff that is not available on the television platform. VOD provides
access to content that previously was not available,” he suggested.
Telewest will be able to put this to the test in the second half of this
year when it starts deploying its 160Gb hard drive PVRs.
Another significant development that caught the imagination of the ECCA
audience was Wideband data – using techniques like channel bonding to
dramatically increase the bandwidth available for high-speed data services.
Cable operators have had great success with their data services – largely
because they were able to provide a better speed-to-price ratio using DOCSIS/EuroDOCSIS
and their HFC networks than that offered by DSL providers. But DSL broadband
providers are steadily increasing the speed of their services and the incumbent
telcos will soon be able to boost their data offering dramatically, thanks
to the roll-out of ADSL2+ and VDSL.
ADSL2+ provides the promise of 10-16Mbps per customer home and while the
figure will decline over distance from the exchange, these figures will probably
be good for around 2,000 metres. VDSL meanwhile, can deliver 20-25Mbps to
the premise over copper loop lengths of 150-450 metres, assuming there is
fibre down to the node.
A good portion of this bandwidth will be eaten away with video services
(a typical offering is likely to be one HD channel and two simultaneous SD
channels for multi-room TV at a total bit rate of around 12Mbps using advanced
codecs) but there will still be plenty left for data.
So, just as cable operators want to put the heat on incumbents with Voice
over IP and mobile voice services, telcos are going to fight back with better
video services but also better high-speed Internet packages.
To combat this data threat, the cable industry is developing DOCSIS 3.0,
which will support channel bonding techniques that enable data rates over
HFC networks of 100Mbps and upwards to subscribers. It is expected that the
US version of the standard will be completed this year with products (CMTS’ and
compatible modems) ready for 2006.
Channel bonding removes the artificial channel spacings (8MHz in Europe)
that are a legacy of analogue TV and allows cable operators to group data
channels together into larger multiplexes. So if 8MHz can deliver 50Mbps of
data then four channels bonded together provides 200Mbps downstream from the
CMTS.
As soon as more services are mixed together, there are inherent efficiencies
due to multiplexing but in addition to this, there is much greater flexibility
when it comes to provisioning. So if somebody wanted to download a movie,
they could be assigned a greater chunk of spectrum for a short period of time,
enabling them to receive the movie in minutes rather than hours.
Mike Caldwell, senior director of product management at CMTS and cable
modem vendor ARRIS describes this application as a turbo button. “Most
of the time people would see a standard performance but if they pull the ‘stick’ they
get higher performance.”
Cisco Systems – which is another major vendor behind Wideband technologies – has
said the goal within DOCSIS 3.0 is to provide ten times the throughput for
one-tenth of the cost and according to Jan Vorstermans, the CTO at Telenet,
this step-change in data performance, if realised, will shift the economics
of DOCSIS so much that it will become possible to start delivering video over
the data channel.
“We are looking at doing that [using DOCSIS to introduce IPTV], especially
for VOD where we have switching requirements, in the next 12 months,” he
told the ECCA audience. “The issue today is cost, as it is much cheaper
to deliver video over DVB technology. But DOCSIS 3.0 could change that significantly.”
The idea that Wideband technologies can open up a new video delivery channel
is exciting cable operators on both sides of the Atlantic. The eventual migration
of cable networks to all-IP is one of the ambitions behind the Next Generation
Network Architecture (NGNA) project in the US and it is generally assumed
there that DOCSIS will provide the IP last mile.
Ralph Brown, the chief technology officer of CableLabs told delegates that
DOCSIS 3.0 will help cable operators deliver commercial services to business
customers, but it is also about entertainment video.
Caldwell – whose company will support four bonded channels on the first
release of its Wideband capable CMTS and modem – believes on-demand
video is one of the most exciting applications for this advanced technology.
But the big question for a cable operator like NTL in the UK, with both
HFC and a copper network for telephony, is whether to pursue its high-speed
data goals using next-generation DOCSIS or DSL technologies. Steve Upton,
managing director networks, said his company has fibre to within 600 feet
(around 180 metres) of customer homes and in trials they have delivered 20Mbps
using DSL on most of their copper loop and 16Mbps on the longest loops.
Upton advocates a mix-and-match approach. “DOCSIS is probably the right
answer for providing the speeds needed at the right cost per customer for
a mass market offering. But DSL may be better for some higher usage customers.
The trick for DOCSIS 3.0 will be to make DOCSIS the best choice for most users,
but potentially we will need DSL to serve the high end of the market.”
Cablecom’s Fischer can certainly see the value of DOCSIS 3.0. He described
the introduction of his company’s high-speed data product in 1999 and
how the key driver for growth was a tripling of bandwidth in 2003. “That
was a landmark step,” he said. “It is no use increasing speeds
by 50 per cent – you really have to take big steps.”
But – adding a note of caution to proceedings – he added that
Swisscom responded to the 2003 upgrade within six months.
The fact is, the telcos are going to keep fighting, and the cable industry
is going to need all these new technologies and services, and a good degree
of marketing flair, to keep them at bay. As so many speakers noted, this is
not about competing infrastructures (the polite title for the first session
at ECCA Congress ‘05) – this is platform wars.
Report: John Moulding
About ECCA
The European Cable Communications Association represents cable operators
and their national associations and its main goal is to foster cooperation
between members and promote and represent their interests at European and
international level. More recently it has helped to draw the European and
US cable industries closer together as they confront a common threat in the
form of telcos. ECCA was created in 1955, when it held its first conference
in Brussels. It is headquartered in the Belgian capital and has 35 members.
More information on ECCA at www.ecca.be, and on ECCA Congress at www.eccacongress.com
