[opendtv] Re: Spectrum is too valuable

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 08:04:20 -0500

On Nov 24, 2015, at 7:13 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


Ron Economos wrote:

Even as an engineer, I'm quite satisfied with the service. I get 100+ HD
channels, and 100 Mbps burst, 50 Mbps sustained from an internet plan
that's advertised as 25 Mbps.

The problem comes when more and more people in your PON spend more time
streaming video content, or otherwise demanding more broadband capacity, and
your now-satisfactory service becomes less so.

In which case the cable company must upgrade the service. As is the case with
Ron, the upgrades have been coming faster than the demand. When I switched to
Cox broadband I was getting peak 25 Mbps with sustained 12-15 Mbps during peak
demand periods. This was recently doubled with no increase in price. And now
they are advertising Gigabit service coming soon...

Let's not forget that genesis of this thread. It was Craig claiming that it
would take decades for "the Internet" to be able to stream TV "to the
masses." Well, it won't take anywhere close to decades, or even a decade. Or
if it does take longer, it will be because of an overabundance of greed, not
because of technical obstacles.

Let's be accurate Bert.

I've never said it would take decades for the Internet to be able to stream TV
to the masses. I have said we cannot switch over completely now because the
capacity is not there yet.

Fortunately that is not a problem because at least 2/3's of the bits used to
deliver TV are still traveling over MPEG-2TS channels (broadcast, Cable and
DBS), and even analog tiers. This is the reason I keep telling Bert to let us
know when the number of MVPD subscribers declines to 50%.

The MPEG broadcast channels are a static level of demand on the cabled systems
- they do not vary based on demand, and can serve 100 or 2000 homes on a PON.
The broadband portion of these systems is dynamic - demand varies based on time
of day and the shift that is taking place to OTT services.

Broadband capacity has been increasing faster than demand in the last mile -
most of the problems with OTT have been related to adequate provisioning of the
wide area interconnections, which is accelerating the provisioning of edge
servers to handle the most popular bits.

It is likely that the cabled systems will be able to recover spectrum which
they can repurpose to broadband based on two developments:

1. Turning off the analog tiers - that will typically recover at least 400 MHz
in legacy systems.

2. Reclaiming MPEG-2TS channels as the need for rerun channels is eliminated by
the shift to OTT SVOD services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, and the TV
Everywhere services that are expanding the viewing options for MVPD subscribers.

I think the growth of TV Everywhere may be more significant than the SVOD
services in terms of moving traffic from the MPEG-2TS channels to Broadband IP,
as there is no additional charge for theses services for MVPD subscribers. And
some of that traffic is moving to other networks or the WiFi hot spots the
cable industry is deploying across their service footprints, as more TV viewing
shifts to mobile devices.

All that being said, it is still likely it will take a decade or more before
the MPEG-2TS channels disappear. This does not mean that these channels will
still use MPEG-2 encoding. The DBS systems have moved most subscribers to STBs
that support h.264. The FIOS systems already use IP and h.264.

And the cable industry is now deploying STBs with h.264 transcoders to support
tablets and smartphones at the point of service, and improved capacity for the
DVR functions of these boxes. If needed the cable systems can recover more
MPEG-2TS channels simply by moving to h.264 encoding as the DBS services have
done. And they might do this in a manner that will allow third party STBs to
work with their systems. TiVo is already doing this, and it would be very easy
for devices like Apple TV, Roku and Fire TV to support cable MVPD services if
they could reach agreement on software based DRM.

Regards
Craig




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