CableLabs prez: HD VOD is cable's best weapon against satellite, IPTV
By Richard Lawler 
posted Jul 1st 2006 4:52PM
posted Jul 1st 2006 4:52PM
With satellite companies rolling out high-def locals all over the place, adding every HDTV channel in existence on one side, and telcos laying fiber as fast as they can on the other, you might think the cable companies are sweating about competing with both challengers on high definition. Not quite. President and CEO of CableLabs Dick Green thinks that cable companies can win by offering something the others don't have yet, HD content via video-on-demand. He believes neither of their competitors have the bandwidth to offer HD VOD to compete with the cable companies. The CEO of Oxygen Media was also quoted as expecting the satellite operators to adapt to the changing marketplace well. All this talk is great, but HD VOD capabilities are useless if there's nothing to watch. We just got it in my area on Comcast, and none of the movies are very compelling material, with the only free sample being Sylvester Stallone's Cliffhanger. It was hard to judge the quality based on that one movie but it didn't seem to compare well to broadcast HD. On the other hand, in a very fragmented market, VOD may be the HD delivery method of choice if competitors like MovieBeam or the HD DVD & Blu-ray camps can't get their act together. For the time being, limited content, lower than expected quality and glitchy inconsistent experiences are the main things they all seem to have in common.
How does on implement bandwidth management under a fully deployed VOD market? At which node within the network are the video srteaming servers located? I'm imagining a Friday or Saturday night when you have 10,000 customers watching 2,000 streamed movies simultaneously. At some point within a market congestion is going to get ugly.
Do they implement some sort of packet prioritization? That would be at the heart of what consumers fear (re: net-neutrality). Will this require a given market to migrate to IP-based video delivery (a la IPTV)? Saying its cable's best weapon against satellite and IPTV is asinine considering IPTV is also being used in CABLE, and being contemplated by most major cable operators to better scale existing bandwidth resources.
Pretty bogus statement if you ask me. Believe me, Verizon Fios has more than enough bandwidth to handle HD-VOD. Fiber optics folks, the sky's the limit.
Actually Ghost raises a valid concern. FTTx WILL be a holy grail when it's widely deployed - but that's not the case yet. The RBOCs are digging up the streets as fast as possible, but it takes time to lay cable. Point to point traffic will present problems if VoD takes off - not over the backbone, but at the regional level where the lines get thinner. This is why cable VoD is far less than 40% deployed right now. Should the take-up of on-demand services find sudden favor, there is definitely a congestion issue to contend with. Most VoD networks are set-up to handle 10% concurrency (a rate rarely met today). But the market can suddenly decide that on-demand is in - and then cable VoD will be SoL.