Vendor Pushing Fiber’s Lower Costs for Video Transport
Following its acquisition of Genesis Systems last year, Global Crossing is promoting its fiber network for more video transport services, executives said. The company hopes to work with pay-TV programmers and distributors for fiber-based distribution of video from pay-TV networks to cable operators and from field producers to main studios. Within a few years some pay-TV networks may even abandon satellite distribution to reach pay-TV headends, said Mike Antonovich, managing director of Genesis Solutions. As more pay-TV distributors build out their fiber facilities for ingesting content, and because of years of consolidation among cable operators, some pay-TV networks may decide it’s not worth the cost of satellite distribution to reach smaller cable operators who aren’t connected to fiber, he said.
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"You're no longer talking about delivering into 5,000 or 8,000 headends,” Antonovich said. “Seventy percent of the cable market is served by about 10 companies,” he said. “A lot of them have wired their master headends to lots and lots of their systems. I think I could be persuasive in saying in the next three to five years you're going to see some channels” move from satellite distribution to fiber, he said. Niche and international programming networks are the likeliest candidates to make the switch, he said. “There will always be an HBO and HBO East and West and satellite,” he said. “Look how long it took to get analog to go away on satellite.” A full-time satellite feed in the U.S. can cost more than $25,000 a month, while a fiber connection could be as little as $5,000, he said.
But satellite’s coverage advantages over fiber are clear, said Richard Buchanan, vice president of content services at Comcast Media Center, Comcast’s video ingest and distribution center. CMC also provides smaller cable operators with programming through its “Headend in the Sky” (HITS) platform. “I've never heard a programmer say ‘I don’t want another sub,'” Buchanan said. “They want to reach every person that’s available. Every set of eyeballs.” And satellite distribution allows networks to reach smaller cable systems that might not be connected to fiber, he said.
CMC is trying to get more of its programming via fiber, Buchanan said. Adding incremental bandwidth to fiber is cheaper than on satellite, he said. “So we are trying to, as much as possible, source from providers at higher bandwidth over fiber,” he said. “We want as much bandwidth as we can get at the beginning” so it can run the video through its own encoders for further distribution, he said. “The way you compress and re-encode the signal has an impact on quality and we're very careful about how we do that.”
But satellite distribution is still an important part of the business, Buchanan said. “This all takes time and you can’t abandon one group in favor of another,” he said. “You need to keep your footprint in both camps as you make the transition so you don’t leave anyone stranded.” In many cases CMC is using both fiber and satellite links for the same programming to improve redundancy, he said. “Satellite is sort of the legacy technology, but it’s still important and you can’t just walk away from it.”