VOD...........................................................
multichannel.com
S-A, Seachange Rally For Consensus on VOD
By FRED DAWSON
Anaheim, Calif. - Scientific-Atlanta Inc. and SeaChange International Inc. are going beyond the current focus on set-top boxes in the Open-Cable initiative in a campaign to generate industry consensus on additional network protocols that are essential to delivering video-on-demand and other interactive services.
"There's an incredible amount of energy building for an end-to-end video-on-demand solution within the cable operating community," said Yvette Gordon, director of interactive technologies at SeaChange, a leading supplier of digital advertising-insertion equipment. "OpenCable is looking at the means of setting up communications at the [set-top] operations system level, but there have to be standards surrounding the interfaces between servers and the equipment in the headend, as well."
Without such standards, Gordon noted, operators would have to turn to proprietary solutions addressing such issues as how the server talks to existing equipment, how interactive sessions and bandwidth allocation are managed, the means by which server-based applications are fed into the video-service stream and the communications system for billing and other back-office interconnections.
Gordon - a former engineering director at Time Warner Cable who worked on its Full Service Network project in Orlando, Fla., and on the MSO's subsequent Pegasus digital set-top request for proposals - said it's important that the industry have more than a VOD solution, which complicates matters further. "The video server has to be used as a source of video segments for a lot of other applications besides movies, such as news-on-demand, where a specific video clip is inserted into the video stream going to a specific subscriber," she noted.
"The goal of this project is that when we have what we think is needed, we'll submit our recommendations to the OpenCable task force," said Kevin Hill, software-product line manager at S-A. "Operators have made it clear that they want suppliers to take this on, and that's what we're doing."
The two companies are in discussions with a number of other vendors, including NextLevel Systems Inc., with the intention of reaching agreement on an open set of APIs (applications program interfaces) that would assure the same level of interoperability among different vendor products at the headend that is sought for set-tops in the OC initiative.
Officials said Time Warner had agreed to provide facilities for beta-testing of the proposed solution, which is expected to be deployable for trials by the fourth quarter of 1998.
"There is strong operator support for this, not only from Time Warner, but from Comcast [Corp.] and many other MSOs," Hill said. "Many operators are making it a condition of their agreements to purchase digital set-tops that we provide them a road map on how we're going to get to VOD."
Hill said this was the case in Comcast's agreement, which was announced last week, to purchase an unspecified quantity of S-A's Explorer 2000 digital set-tops for deployment in Baltimore County, Md., starting next spring."VOD is right in the realm
of what operators are accustomed to delivering to customers, as opposed to some interactive services, which represent new types of business development and operations challenges," Hill noted.
S-A looks at the Explorer as a "Model A" version of the OC set-top, which is the baseline unit on top of which other, more advanced models will also be specced in the standards-setting process, said Bob Van Orden, director of digital video at S-A.
While the OC spec is not expected to be completed until sometime in the spring, Van Orden said Explorer "matches up pretty closely" with the overall architecture already enumerated by Cable Television Laboratories Inc., which includes the use of "middleware" software that communicates between the set-top operating system and the headend using HTML (hypertext markup language, which supports linking of subjects across the Internet) and JavaScript, a compact coding system for
embedding operating instructions within an application.
The push for a standardized approach to VOD reflects the growing urgency among many MSOs for means of adding revenue-
generating services that will help to justify the costs of deploying digital boxes. The Explorer, for example, which comes with a built-in data modem and substantial microprocessing support for graphics rendering and interactive applications, costs "in the low $400" range in limited volumes, Van Orden said.
"Over an extended period of time, it's not unlikely to think that we'll see 20 percent to 30 percent of our subscribers taking more advanced interactive services," said Mark Coblitz, vice president of strategic planning for Comcast. "We think - from the experiences of Time Warner in Orlando, of ourselves and of other MSOs in trials in other places - that there really is a fairly good segment of the population that will want video-on-demand and other things going beyond digital broadcast."
While there is an urgency to achieve a standardized approach that will allow rollout of VOD-type services on a mass scale, late 1998 is a reasonable time frame to target for completion of a set of recommendations, given the time that operators need just to get used to marketing and operating broadcast digital services, Hill noted. "People want to have the capability to move to advanced services, but they don't want to overwhelm themselves at the outset," he said.
SeaChange has taken its first commercial step into VOD with the delivery of an analog system to Time Warner for supply of such services to hotels in Manhattan and in Hawaii. The system, using fiber connections to hotels and multidwelling units, allows operators to supply VOD from a headend-based server in analog format, eliminating the need to install expensive pay-per-view gear on premises. Time Warner has connected two hotels - the Millennium Broadway and the Barbizon - to its Hotel Network system in Manhattan, and it has lined up three hotels as initial customers for its Oceanic system in Hawaii, officials said. SeaChange - which began marketing the system to the industry at large last week, following a six-month prove-in period with Time Warner - is offering a turnkey service to aid operators in setting up accounts with hoteliers.
"The system-capital costs come to $600 per room, and we're seeing revenues generated on a per-room basis that are equivalent to monthly cable-subscriber rates," said Ed Delaney, vice president of sales and marketing for SeaChange. "It's an economic model that works for small, 50-room motels, as well as big hotels, which means that the little guys can provide a true VOD service that goes beyond the standard PPV hotel systems." While SeaChange has the software and hardware components in place to support delivery of a digital VOD system for the general subscriber market, the company sees no sense in moving to a commercial product until the standards issue is resolved, Gordon noted. "We're working with several groups to make sure that we're moving in the same direction," she said, noting that in addition to the OC initiative, various MSOs are working together in search of solutions for the server interfaces at the headend. |
