NDS PREPARES FOR 'VIRTUAL CHANNELS'
03/24/99
Interspace
(c) 1999 Phillips Business Information, Inc.
Major changes are about to affect satellite and cable set-top box design and functionality, leading to the creation of viewer- specific "virtual channels", which are likely to use cheap satellite transponder capacity to broadcast tailored content overnight. This is the belief of Dr Abe Peled, CEO at News Corp's technology company News Digital Systems (NDS), who sees the ever-falling costs of hard drive storage as "the sleeper of technology." Peled suggested improved compression algorithms and improved chip-sets will also improve MPEG -2 compression ratios "by a factor of about two," over today's eight and ten to one compression levels.
"When the PC first came out, in the early 1980s, it came with 10Mb of local storage. Today you would be hard pressed to find anything with less than 2Gb of storage. That's an improvement factor of 200 times. The modem at that time was about 2400b/s, today the equivalent would be a 28.8Kb/s, another significant growth factor," said Peled. But he said the cost of high-capacity hard drives make them affordable in the next generation of STBs.
"Today's improved compression could give us today 400 channels of content without a problem," said Peled. "But if you add 10Gb into the STB now, costing around $100 next year, that would add another 50- 80 virtual channels. But go just a little further. 100Gb of storage would mean 800 virtual channels. And 100Gb is suggested for within the next five years. So we think the biggest revolution as far as the consumer is concerned will be local storage, which will completely change the paradigm for viewers, which is currently based on time. We ask 'what's on now'. Local storage changes that, and we can start asking 'what would I like to watch'. It is going to be content-driven from your local disk, with maybe 1,000 hours of choice, and not necessarily the 200 hours of broadcast channel choice."
NDS will be showcasing developments surrounding such concepts at the upcoming NAB convention in Las Vegas (April 17-22). Peled even predicts that channel schedulers might not be needed in the near future. "You can come home and view Friends or Eastenders, whether it is on the air or not. Because the next generation of boxes will create a content-based paradigm, not a time-based paradigm. Programme schedulers get paid a lot of money to package together an interesting evening of material. They will vanish. And advertisers will need to look again, perhaps even paying us to view their ads. They will either have to be very entertaining or give us a reward, perhaps a prize, for watching them."
Besides predicting the imminent death of channel schedulers, Peled makes another bold forecast, suggesting collective viewing of programmes will also decline. "The reason people want to watch TV is because they like to chat about it the next day around the water- cooler. And that is true, and big events, sports, news stories, and other key programming will still attract viewers. But the fact is that in the US some 40 per cent of viewers don't bother to watch these big events. They tune away. My answer is 'yes', there will be a some boring people who want to talk about last night's big event. And my TV friends say they are still in the majority. But there will be another group of people who might see it an hour later, or the next day, or the following week. They want the content, not the time."
NDS is focusing on the concept that broadcasts can be made via inexpensive satellite transponders in broadcasting 'down time', overnight for example. Transmissions need not be made in linear real- time but at high-speed, with the STB not only decoding the compression ratio but converting the signal into linear real-time. Peled also suggests that such content, stored in a hard drive-based caching system, would be tailored to specific demographics and viewing patterns.
Peled is scathing about the trend for integrated digital TVs. "Integrated TVs are a bad idea. We keep TVs for eight or 10 years, or even longer. But computer technology changes every year to 18 months. I think the best concept is a high-quality monitor and a STB that you can change or upgrade cheaply every few years."
NDS said it has supplied some 28 per cent of encoder/decoders for the American HDTV market, and expects more installations prior to May 1 when another group of stations are expected to come on air. NDS will also launch its solution for digital electronic news gathering at NAB, which it said, will mean that live outside broadcast links are many times more reliable.
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