The article is by Anjan Sur, a strategic business analyst for the Zee Convergence Group, Bangalore(sura@zeenetwork.com)

(Posted on 23 January 2001, 17:45 pm)

Summary: Cable has a few distinct advantages over other transmission media in India. From a business perspective, the reach of cable is large (the current penetration level is stated to be 27 million households, with rapid growth projections). If technology is taken into consideration, then the wide bandwidth carrying capacity of cable is unmatched.

Currently, the only services being offered over the cable distribution network are the satellite TV and terrestrial broadcast channels with Internet piped over cable being the latest addition. This article explores the viability of offering services such as video on demand, gaming, music et all over the cable network.

The primary limitation for offering these services over the Internet is that they are broadband applications and sufficient bandwidth is not available currently to push them through. However, a few localized solutions may be implemented in order to provide these services in cable cities and it is envisaged that once the optic fiber rings are in place, a full-scale roll out of these services would be possible.

Cable-Technical Insight: The cable industry is in the midst of a transformation from self-contained, coaxial distribution systems that feature one-way delivery of analog television signals to two-way, interactive broadband systems involving a hybrid of traditional coaxial and modern fiber optic technologies.

The existing feeder and drop lines represent the cable industry's "last mile" of plant into the consumer's home. These lines are high bandwidth coaxial cable, which are capable of delivering broadband applications at very high data rates of up to 27 Mbps. The cable industry's broadband platform makes cable an optimal medium for transmitting large amounts of digital information -- data, graphics, and video -- at high speeds. Cable companies can operate as "pipeline" or "conduit" services, or become full-service providers of Internet access and other value-added services (such as video on demand, gaming etc.)

Need for value added services: There are several strategic and financial reasons why it would be essential to develop the technical expertise to offer value added services over the cable distribution network. First and foremost is that it will make financial sense to do so. Applications such as video on demand are rapidly gaining popularity in the Western markets and it would be a safe assumption to say that there will be sufficient demand for say a popular bouquet of Hindi movie videos or songs. The modalities for pricing etc. of these services is yet to take concrete shape, but a few suggestions have been incorporated.

The other strategic reason is that bandwidth provided through the cable network will ultimately become a commodity and the only viable money making proposition will be these value added services. Consider the following:

• Large players are already laying optic fiber cable rapidly. While international bandwidth may still be a problem, there will be sufficient bandwidth available internally.
• In such a scenario, the winner will be the bandwidth provider who provides value added services apart from the normal TV feed.
• Gaming and video on demand will be the perfect high bandwidth applications to generate revenue and utilize the high bandwidth capacity of the coaxial cables to the full.
• This will also help largely curtail the practice of small time cable operators switching over to competing MSOs providing cheaper services.
  

Possible value added services: In addition to providing the traditional bouquet of TV channels as well as Internet access over the cable network, the following could provide the potentially killer thrust to the delivery of content and services over cable:

1. Video on Demand: Digital compression technology will enable cable companies to offer a greater number of channels as well as interactive capability and ensure that video on demand will be part of the features. This service allows customers to select from a range of movies, sporting events, or concerts for viewing at their convenience.

2. Interactive Games: Users can play games on their PCs and/or their television sets with the introduction of this feature. The gaming software itself is hosted on servers and is not downloadable by the user.

3. Music on Demand: A music library/catalog is again available with the service provider and the user has a jukebox like facility to play it directly from the server without actually being able to download it from the server. This is where it differs from the Napster/Gnutella model.

4. Interactive Shopping and Advertising: Interactivity will permit cable subscribers to request consumer information on businesses, products, and services at the touch of a button. Customers can view real estate in full-motion video and to access details on contractors, mortgage rates, and lending institutions.

The Technology used: Delivering high bandwidth applications using Internet technologies over cable concerns improving the efficiency of the methods used to transport audiovisual data. With applications such as video on demand and video conferencing where multiple users might be involved viewing the same piece of video, the issue of limited bandwidth becomes important, because of the need to share resources amongst the connected users.

Video file compression: The amount of data can be made less by using video compression. A video compression codec, is typically an algorithm which analyses the video data in terms of spatial, temporal and frequency content to determine which data is not required and can be left out. These videos are compressed using some of the standard compression formats such as MPEG video format.

Video streaming: A streaming file format is one that has been specially encoded so that it can be played while it downloads, instead of having to wait for the whole file to download (buffering). A streaming file format also includes extra information such as timing, compression and copyright information.

IP Multicasting: Multicast (point-to-multipoint) is a communication pattern in which a source host sends a message to a group of destination hosts. A major advantage of using multicasting is the decrease of the network load. Since multicasting requires the transmission of only a single packet by the source and replicates this packet only if it is necessary (at forks of the multicast delivery tree), multicast transmission can conserve the much needed network bandwidth.

How it will work: The primary constraint being bandwidth, the servers providing these value added applications have to be localized at the cable TV head-ends. Once the optic fiber rings are in place, this will be redundant as there will be only a single head-end (e.g. the RPG head-end in Calcutta). Hardware and software products are already available which enable the compression and streaming of applications such as movies in MPEG-2 format using IP multicasting techniques. One important consideration here is that there are theoretical limitations to the number of users who can avail these services from one single node. While international norms restrict the number of such concurrent usages to around 500, it can conceivably stretched up to 2000 in the Indian milieu.

Since the delivery mechanism is cable, users have the option of accessing these services on their television sets or their PCs, depending upon the availability of a set top box or otherwise. There will be a local portal dedicated to these services (www.localhost.com) from which the user can take his pick of movies, games, music etc. The information is related upstream to the server from where the application is run. At no time is the user able to download the service itself, thus maintaining copyright issues etc. Techniques of load balancing, redundancy etc. will have to be introduced to offer QoS to the customers.

The path ahead: While it is clear that the service providers who acquire the technological sophistication to offer these VAS will have a definite market advantage, there are several potential minefields which cannot be wished away. First and foremost is the issue of billing the customer for the service provided. There can be several models for the same (based on the bandwidth consumed, IP packets transferred, number of requests made etc.) However, the introduction of Conditional Access System (CAS) will solve the issue, wherein different pricing models for different groups of customers can be programmed.

Last but not the least, the service providers will have to tackle the issue of acquiring the copyright for the movies, music etc. This will not be as straightforward as it appears to be, because as of now the rights are different for cable transmission and transmission over the Internet and in our case it is really a combination of the two. But this is undoubtedly the way forward for the cable industry which is increasingly now being corporatized.

For Hathway Cable & Datacom story click here