Comcast’s Future Services
October 4, 2011, TVNext, San Jose, CA–Steven Reynolds from Comcast talked about the future of video service devices in a multi-platform universe. The next generation of services will be delivered via the customer’s on-premise equipment.
The service providers consider this new set of services to be in the future. Video over IP is going to change the industry much more quickly. The driver for the change is the movement from managed to unmanaged services, bandwidth, and devices. The biggest challenge is to meet expectations for quality video over the STB.
The first indication of change was the 4th play, to deliver video to mobile devices. This change moved content consumption from the PC to any IP device, which include PC, STB, tablet, console, and Blu-Ray player. Services went from managed from the video provider to user generated and Web playback. Bandwidth needs are increasing as more content moves to the cloud, home networks, and WiFi access points where quality of service is an issue. Independent of source, people want 1080P video and TV-level responsiveness. Carriers need to have adaptive technologies to deliver content to the end-point.
The new landscape is a mix of managed and unmanaged parallel services. The scope of the changes is very large. Currently, Xfinity serves 79 million devices. This will increase dramatically by 2015 as households move to contain more than 6 connected devices. This set of devices is broken down as 38 M connected TVs, 182 M tablets, 57 M Blu-Ray players, 80 M consoles, and some additional IP endpoints yet to exist. Comcast is planning for 234 M devices by the end of ’13.
Viewers will use 3.5 devices per week by ’15, up from the current 2.7 devices. 40 percent of those devices will be user controlled and 25 percent will get their content from the Internet. These numbers indicate an opportunity to respond to the changes. By moving to IP video, companies can get economies of scale from other technologies. Time to market is likely to increase for new products as outside ecosystems and changing technologies require more development resources. Operational efficiencies will come from an all IP environment.
If the carriers push IP to the edge devices from an Internet backbone, they can create new apps and services at a faster rate. Customer owned and managed devices and bandwidth will take delivery of best or most efficient bandwidth. The resulting hybrid delivery system will use QAM and IP video through an end-to-end H264 backplane. Delivery will be sent to QAM/cable modem enabled with integrated transcoders. Users will still need some type of STB, just as the transition from analog to digital needed adapters. This change is a generational shift.
The industry will need to adapt to the existing glass. Infrastructure changes have to be 100 percent compatible with the existing infrastructure which is QAM. The integrated STB will use existing standards all the way to the end points. The home network will be based on MOCA (Multimedia Over Coax Alliance) for carrier-grade transport and the MAC/PHY part of the control plane will be over DLNA. The CableLabs reference designs will ensure interoperability. Security and permissions will be through DTCP/IP.
Apps will move from a PC-based focus to a post HTML environment where the apps plus HTML5 will be the working framework. Unfortunately, H264 is becoming more fragmented, so much work needs to be done here. The system will need to be adaptive, programmable pipelines similar to Adobe Access or Microsoft Smooth are needed to manage playout and synchronize the audio and video.
Having a full ecosystem will enable other services such as closed captions and will deliver a full range of services to all platforms. Much of this future system already exists, such as IPTV through Android or iOS. The challenges are to make the new system easy to use, interoperable, and portable. The industry must take a long term approach to this transition. The goal for service providers is to get new services on existing platforms even with legacy devices.
Fragmentation will continue to be a problem for the industry. HTML has too many branches that are incompatible. The systems need access to video players’ internal functions or the whole system loses flexibility and even some programs. Security needs to evolve to meet new operating conditions. This change is all about service velocity, the reduction in time for development and deployment cycles.
