Cable Engineers Don’t See Traditional Set-tops Disappearing Soon
TORONTO -- Scrambling to upgrade to Internet Protocol video transmission as quickly as possible, four of North America’s largest cable operators don’t think existing cable set-top boxes, TV sets and other legacy video devices will disappear from homes for many years to come. At the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers Canadian conference last week, top engineering executives from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Rogers Communications and Bright House Networks said they view IP video as the best way to deliver more advanced features and applications to subscribers, such as multi-screen video, network DVR service, interactive TV applications and converged services. They see IP video as the best way to reach the rapidly growing number of new IP-enabled devices, including smart TVs, game consoles, tablets and smart phones.
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"Comcast is very bullish on IP,” said Senior Vice President Raymond Celona. Citing estimates that the average U.S. home will have six IP-enabled devices by 2015, he noted Comcast has been testing its new IP-enabled service, known as X1, in Augusta, Ga., and plans to roll it out extensively later this year.
The four cable operators will likely end up installing some type of IP video gateways in customers’ homes to serve all these broadband-enabled devices, their executives said. These gateways will either attach directly to TV sets like current-day set-tops or sit in basements or utility closets, sending video signals around the home. None of the cable engineers expect the transformation to an all-IP home to occur at all quickly or neatly. Most think they'll be distributing legacy QAM video signals to households for some time to come, then using hybrid QAM/IP video gateways in homes to transcode the signals to IP video, at least partly because of the need to serve legacy TV sets that cannot be easily upgraded or replaced. “It’s inevitable,” Celona said. “It is a hybrid world."
Traditional set-tops aren’t going away any time soon, the executives said. They believe digital set-tops will linger in homes for the rest of the decade, if not longer. “The classic set-top will be around for a long time,” said Senior Vice President Dermot O'Carroll of Rogers. “There will be a [set-top] device in the home for a long, long time.” Senior Vice President Jeff Chen of Bright House took it even further. The set-top box is “a necessary evil,” he declared. He noted that without cable set-tops, consumers would have to switch out their TVs every two or three years because of needed service and feature upgrades.
Questioned about budding TV Everywhere ambitions, all four cable executives said their companies are now technically ready to serve multiple video devices both inside and outside the home. The only thing stopping them from serving devices anywhere, they said, is the lack of a legal right to beam most video programming beyond the home. “That’s not a technical question,” said Jim Ludington, executive vice president of Time Warner Cable, which has started serving tablets, smart phones and PCs inside the home and has been raring to beam programming to devices outside the home. “It’s a content question,” he said. “It’s a rights question.”
The companies expect to extend fiber lines closer to customers’ homes over the next few years by shrinking fiber node and service group sizes. The engineers told SCTE they expect to bring higher modulation QAM programs closer to the home, boosting bandwidth capacity and the quality of service. “The beauty of the HFC [hybrid fiber-coax] network is that we can go progressively node by node closer to the home,” O'Carroll said. “I think it just gets better.” The executives agreed that operators will likely not extend their fiber lines all the way to a subscriber’s TV set, PC or even home any time soon because there’s no need to do so. “Fiber will go deeper and deeper” into the network, Chen said. “But I don’t see fiber going straight to the back of the TV. There will still be conversion [to coax] somewhere.” Ludington put it more bluntly. “We'll take fiber to where the money is,” he said. “We'll take it to where it makes the most business sense."
The cable technologists expect to expand the reach of their wireless broadband networks much further. Time Warner Cable is looking to increase the number of Wi-Fi hotspots in its footprint from about 1,000 now to more than 10,000 by the end of the year. But the executives don’t see a need to abandon their existing wireline networks in favor of wireless, because of the wired plant’s greater bandwidth capacity. “Anything that’s wireless turns to wireline very quickly,” Ludington said, noting wireless carriers depend heavily on wired links to cell towers and base stations. “All that’s wireless is wireline.” Celona agreed. “Wireless is an extension,” he said, “not a replacement.”