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Archive for the 'Digital Cable' Category

IBC Report - Civolution water-marking technology poised for Q1 2010 rollout with major US pay-TV operator

September 12, 2009 by Barry Flynn

The first large-scale deployment of watermarking technology in the pay-TV world should take place in the US in Q1 next year, Connected TV has learned.

Watermarking is a technique which embeds invisible identifiers into broadcast and other content, which can survive multiple transmission, compression and copying stages, in order to identify the sources of pirated material. Each device in the pre-production, production and transmission chain, all the way down to individual set-top boxes, can be given a unique code to pinpoint where the ‘leak’ has taken place.

Speaking at IBC, Alex Terpstra, CEO of Philips watermarking spin-off Civolution, declined to name the US operator in question, but said the Civolution solution it would be supplying is a hybrid one, integrating the technology at the encoder end and the set-top box. This means that as well as identifying piracy taking place at the headend, any set-top box used to illegally re-distribute protected material  can be precisely identified.

“There will be deployments in the field, we hope, in Q1 in North America,” he said. “I believe it is a break-through in the development of this industry.” The water-marking technology will be targeted at  protecting HDTV content.

Previously, except for a few small-scale IPTV deployments where watermarking is integrated into the DRM system , such content identification technologies have been confined to the pre-release market.

Examples include protecting preview copies of films given limited distribution before events such as the Oscars or the Cannes Film Festival, or content aimed at in-hotel distribution (where premium movies are made available before standard pay-per-view and pay-TV release windows).

Terprstra said the fact that the technology was now mature would permit new business models: for example, consumers might be happy to pay a premium to watch a movie at home in VOD mode while (or even before) it was being shown in the cinema. Previously, the studios might have been reluctant to allow this to happen without some sort of guarantee that piracy risks were being addressed.

At IBC, Civolution also announced that Taiwanese company MStar Semiconductor had become the first chipset maker to integrate NexGuard - Civolution’s core watermarking technology - in hardware, as part of its MSD3A11 chipset.

Posted in Digital Cable, Digital Satellite, Digital Terrestrial and IPTV. 0 Comments

Farncombe: Pay-TV shift to two-way networks will mean move away from smartcard-based conditional access systems

May 21, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Farncombe Consulting Group, which hosts this blog, has just published a new White Paper on how the Digital TV Conditional Access sector will be affected by the shift towards broadband-enabled pay-TV networks.

Written by Farncombe’s own highly-experienced group of in-house video security experts, the White Paper assesses the pros and cons of using smartcard-based and cardless systems in different types of pay-TV set-up, ranging from traditional one-way broadcast TV operations to broadband-enabled two-way IP and connected home networks.

The paper concludes that while smartcards continue to remain the solution of choice for protecting one-way systems, cardless-based solutions are preferable for protecting video content in IPTV, ‘over-the-top’ and home networking contexts.

For one-way networks migrating to broadband connectivity, meanwhile, both types of system have their advantages, depending largely on the availability, reliability and quality of the broadband network.

The White Paper’s authors go on to suggest that since the traditional one-way pay-TV world is slowly but surely changing into a two-way one, it is likely that there will be a gradual shift away from smartcard-based systems in favour of cardless ones - led by the digital cable sector.

A PDF of the new White Paper can be obtained from Farncombe by clicking here and filling in a simple registration form.

Posted in Broadband, Digital Cable, Digital Satellite, Digital Terrestrial, IPTV and TV-over-Internet. 0 Comments

The trick-mode trigger: a new paradigm for TV advertising in an on-demand world?

April 1, 2009 by Barry Flynn

As the traditional TV world migrates to an on-demand environment (‘over-the-top’ or otherwise), the evidence so far has been that where viewers are given the opportunity to, they will generally fast-forward through the ad breaks.

Various strategems have been adopted by broadcasters and advertisers to get round consumer resistance to interruptive advertising, generally involving some sort of implied bargain. For instance, the benefit of being able to make up for having missed a popular programme by viewing it in ‘catch-up’ mode is commonly set against the fact that the ads in the catch-up stream can’t be ‘zapped’. Similarly, if you want to watch an on-demand movie without any commercial breaks interrupting the action, it’s often impossible to skip the ‘pre-roll’ ad welded onto the front of it.

Well, on the evidence of three separate exhibitors at last week’s IPTV World Forum, a new paradigm is evolving. It hasn’t got a name, yet, so let’s invent one: ‘trick-mode triggers’ (you heard it here first).

The idea is to exploit the fact that on-demand viewing allows viewers to interrupt their own viewing by using VCR-like ‘trick modes’ such as pause, rewind and (yes) fast-forward - the very feature causing the zapping issue in the first place.

Connected TV has already mentioned the use of the ‘pause’ function in ANT’s Amazon application, which triggers a window showing ‘contextual’ DVDs or books available to purchase at the Amazon store. However, NDS - the private technology firm owned by the Permira Funds and News Corporation - also featured it when demonstrating the latest version of its Infinite TV technology, which Connected TV reviewed after its first showing at last year’s IBC trade-fair in Amsterdam.

Geoff Todd, NDS’s director of sales and new business initiatives, referred to it as ‘on-pause’ advertising. In the example he demonstrated, pressing ‘pause’ during the replay of a cookery programme created a Flash-based wrapper around the video advertising a relevant ingredient. In fact, this type of trick-mode related feature has been implicit in Infinite TV’s targeted advertising platform from inception, although the capability wasn’t emphasised at IBC.

The platform allows the effectiveness of different types of targeted ads (e.g. ‘pre-roll’ versus ‘on-pause’) to be compared, and their subsequent application refined. “[Infinite TV tells you] which kinds of ads have been consumed,” said Todd. “If trick-mode works better, you can pull the pre-roll or mid-roll ad.”

The third example at the show came from set-top box manufacturer ADB, which was showing Stream Group’s Solocoo online TV portal being accessed from one of its hybrid DTT-IP hybrid models.

In the demonstration shown, the trigger wasn’t the result of trick-mode use, but instead arose when the viewer decided to use the familiar left-and-right arrows on the remote control to check what was currently playing on adjacent channels, using the mini-EPG at the bottom of the screen display. At this point, the mini-EPG displayed a YouTube icon, which when the red button was pressed, offered a choice of relevant YouTube video-clips to play back. The relevant factor, however, is that the call-to-action was displayed when the viewer chose to interrupt their own viewing.

As we have noted here before, interruptive advertising may be something of an aberration - one reason viewers dispense with it when they can. But placing advertising or other calls-to-action in the breaks viewers create for themselves as part of their on-demand viewing experience could well prove to be much more acceptable - particularly when the trigger invokes contextual promotional material.

(NB NDS is a sponsor of the Connected TV blog)

Posted in Digital Cable, Digital Satellite, Digital Terrestrial, IPTV and TV-over-Internet. 2 Comments

IPTV World Forum: AT&T U-verse and the multi-room, multi-screen, networked future

March 27, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Day Two of the IPTV World Forum began for Connected TV with a presentation from Griff Parry, director of on-demand at BSkyB, who (as Sky executives are always prone to at such events) ended his remarks by playing the audience a glossy promotional video. This showed how a typical multi-screen Sky household in 2012 might be consuming the pay-TV operator’s content.

Parry cautioned that some of the functionalities the promo displayed - which included amongst other features personalised EPGs for each family member, and the ability to pause a PVR-recorded programme in one room and pick it up from the same point in another - would not necessarily be available within a three-year time-frame, if at all.

Interesting, then, to contrast this take on the future from one of Europe’s leading TV technology innovators with a presentation to analysts at the end of the day from Franz Kurath, AT&T’s executive director of broadband content and converged services. This showed, among other things, that the ability to swap PVR content mid-play between different TV sets - a relatively distant possibility, according to the Sky presentation - was already a reality for US customers, through AT&T’s Microsoft Mediaroom-powered U-verse IPTV platform.

In addition, U-verse’s Total Home DVR allows up to 5 HD streams to be viewed simultaneously, said Kurath - two being consumed live, with three being streamed off the Total Home DVR. This box acts as the master, with standard U-verse receivers attached to other TV sets acting as ‘slaves’ - although the user experience on each TV set remains identical. The same recorded show can also be accessed, played back and controlled independently on up to 4 separate TV sets.

Such technology does not come cheap, of course. As Connected TV noted in a previous post, AT&T has twice had to scale back the U-verse project, increasing its spend on the rollout (to close to $5bn) while reducing its coverage. And though U-verse now has more than 1m subscribers enjoying its advanced features, AT&T admitted in its Q4 08 results that it now expects to reach its previously announced target of 30m homes passed, in 2011 - a year later than originally planned. Currently, it’s passing 17m.

Will the investment have been worth it? AT&T’s corporate line is vague, stating that it expects “U-verse services to become a multi-billion-dollar revenue opportunity over the next few years,” a phrase Kurath repeated almost word-for-word last night.

Certainly, the service appears to work well. Kurath noted that J.D. Power had accorded it the highest customer satisfaction levels for video service in those regions where it was available, and it has already received a number of awards - including 2009 Consumer Communications Service Product of the Year from Frost & Sullivan.

The comparison between BSkyB tomorrow and AT&T today is a little invidious, perhaps. AT&T enjoys late-mover advantage, allowing it to benefit from the latest technologies. BSkyB is much more constrained in what it is able to achieve given that it needs to address a legacy platform dating back to 1998, and not only a less mature broadband and networked home environment, but a less advanced HDTV one, too.

Another key difference, arguably, is that BSkyB is a dominant pay-TV operator. AT&T is not, competing against established digital satellite players in the form of DirecTV and Dish Network on the one hand and cable incumbents such as Comcast on the other. So as challenger AT&T needs state-of-the-art feature-sets such as those offered by the U-verse Total Home DVR to differentiate itself from the competition.

BSkyB can afford to be a little more relaxed, perhaps: neither Virgin Media’s cable platform nor BT Vision are about to offer such a rich multi-room feature-set any time soon.

(Declaration of interest: Microsoft Mediaroom sponsors the Connected TV blog)

Posted in Digital Cable, Digital Satellite and IPTV. 0 Comments

IMS Research: Digital cable to be leading HDTV platform in China with 3.2m HD subs by end-2013

January 6, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Some new research out from IMS Research reveals some rare data on the Chinese digital TV market, suggesting - among other things - that digital cable is set to become the country’s dominant digital TV platform by the end of 2009, and the focus for its HDTV rollout. (Sorry, no link seems to be available as yet - I’m relying on the press release I’ve been sent).

The study, entitled The Worldwide Market for High-Definition TV Equipment & Services, reveals that 46 million homes in twenty-five Chinese cities have now converted from analogue to digital cable, and that 69 million homes will be passed by digital cable by the end of the year. IMS Research is forecasting that 3.2 million of these digital cable households will have the capability of viewing HDTV programming by the end of 2013.

The author of the study, Shane Walker, notes that the main driver behind adoption of HD programming and HDTV products in the Asia-Pacific region has been Japan, with over 12 million HDTV households at the end of 2007 - 90% of the region’s HD households. Other territories, including China, have been held back by lack of availability of localised HD programming and the high cost of consumer equipment.

However, China’s State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has been strongly promoting the concept of a national digital cable network, striving to digitise all cable networks by 2015. According to the latest figures from SARFT, the transition is behind schedule by two years, but China is already one of the world’s largest digital cable markets, surpassing the USA (which had around 37m digital cable subs at the end of 2007, according to the NCTA).

Posted in Digital Cable and Research. 0 Comments