An Evolving Tack on Tech
From switched digital Video to caller ID on TV, company takes its time to keep its edge
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 9/23/2007 8:00:00 PM
It has an unmatched digital-video penetration rate of 81%. The broadest rollout of switched digital video. And more high-definition channels — 40, as of the end of June — than any other major operator.
How did Cablevision Systems get its technical edge? Fundamentally, the company put the right infrastructure in place with a 750-Megahertz network buildout in the early 2000s, which provided more capacity than some believed necessary at the time, said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett.
And while Cablevision was later than other operators in deploying digital video and voice services, it now boasts far higher take rates than operators that moved sooner. “Sometimes doing it right,” Moffett said, “is better than doing it early.”
Moffett said much of the credit for the company's technical leadership goes to Wilt Hildenbrand, who started at Cablevision in 1976 as chief engineer of the company's Long Island system.
“Technical innovation here is sort of a living, breathing organism,” said Hildenbrand, now senior adviser of engineering and technology.
But, he added, nothing Cablevision does is an aimless academic exercise. “Myself, or other people on the team, we don't just throw things up on the wall and see if they will stick,” he said. “We're not testing things for the sake of testing things.”
To Hildenbrand, Cablevision fosters “a very iterative sort of environment. … We start with ideas that are naturally evolutionary.”
That methodical approach relies on years of planning ahead. Take, for example, a new feature Cablevision plans to roll out this fall: caller ID on TV. Scheduled to be available in November, the feature pops up the phone number and name of an incoming caller on a triple-play subscriber's TV screen.
Getting caller ID on TV into production required Cablevision to write the on-screen application, which runs on Scientific Atlanta's set-top box software, as well as having the foresight to use set-top boxes with built-in cable modems. Just as important, Cablevision had originally deployed the Siemens softswitch system that powers the Optimum Voice service with an eye toward someday providing this kind of feature, Hildenbrand said.
“It grew out of some of the other applications that are already aware of messaging,” he said.
At a higher level, Cablevision develops new services collaboratively, getting engineering, marketing and customer-support personnel together in the same room to plot next steps, according to senior vice president of product management John Trierweiler.
One area where this process recently blossomed was in Cablevision's switched digital video rollout. In January, the operator launched iO International, a suite of 10 non-English-language programming packages — in Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Polish, among others — after completing the nation's biggest switched-digital video rollout, in terms of footprint, in late 2006.
“On the demand side, we identified a need in ethnic customer areas, and we worked with the operations team to get understanding of how we could deliver that,” Trierweiler said. “Then we worked with programming to find out what channels we could provide.”
Hildenbrand's group, meanwhile, had been noodling with new technologies to deliver niche programming for several years. “The idea was, What if it almost worked like a jukebox, and you have a billion songs in there — but it would play them only based on popularity?” he said.
Today, on the back of its SDV infrastructure, Cablevision offers about 60 iO International channels to all 2.6 million digital-video customers in the New York area.
On another front, Cablevision didn't shy away from pushing forward on a technically innovative service — a network-based digital video recorder — that riled its programming partners. The RS-DVR service (RS stands for remote server), which had been scheduled to go live last year, would have given subscribers all the features of a DVR without the need for a box with a bunch of spinning disk drives in it.
Before the operator could launch RS-DVR, though, major broadcasters and cable networks sued Cablevision for copyright infringement. The company declined to comment on the project, as Cablevision's appeal in the case is pending, but the operator has argued that RS-DVR would speed DVR deployment to all digital subscribers.
Switched digital video has no such roadblocks, and the next link in the SDV iteration chain is providing the capacity to deliver 500 high-definition channels by the end of 2007.
Cablevision can get there, Hildebrand said, through use of switched digital video along with reclaiming analog spectrum, optimizing video signals with variable bit-rate encoding and using other techniques.
“We're adding up all the things we see in this two- to two-and-half-year event horizon … and I can come up with a model that says I can do 500 HD channels, without all kinds of caveats,” he said.
Variable bit-rate encoding, for example, uses advanced statistical multiplexing techniques to stuff more video signals — up to 50% more channels, according to some vendors — into the same amount of bandwidth.
Hildenbrand hasn't seen the advertised 50% improvement yet. “I'd be happy with 30% right now,” he said. “I want to get improvement in picture quality, and more efficiencies.”
And after that? Cablevision is looking carefully at MPEG-4, a more efficient video-compression technology that is supposed to use as little as half the bandwidth of the current de facto standard MPEG-2. “It's an inevitability,” Hildenbrand said of MPEG-4.
Set-tops will soon be available with chips that support both video formats, Hildenbrand noted: “That's a good hedge against the future.”
Another development Cablevision has cooking in the labs is wireless data. Hildenbrand doesn't necessarily see an advantage in delivering a service over existing cellular networks — which, after all, were designed for voice. The applications driving wireless growth today are data-oriented, he pointed out.
And just as Cablevision decided to forgo offering a circuit-switched voice product — waiting until cable modems could provide reliable IP-based voice — Hildenbrand sees a data-oriented wireless network as the preferred path.
“I don't want to rebuild another cellular network,” said Hildenbrand. “I'd rather build a data network and layer IP voice on top of it.”
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