Leslie Ellis's blog

The Next Big Thing In Video Compression

By: Leslie Ellis Oct 4 2012 - 7:57am

It happens about every decade, and the third one is almost upon us: A new standard for video compression, bound to make video shipping better.

It’s called “HEVC,” for “High Efficiency Video Coding.” You’ll see it demo into the industrial mainstream at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in January, and into your handhelds and TVs a year hence from that.

When Does the 6-MHz Channel Disappear?

By: Leslie Ellis Sep 17 2012 - 2:36pm

When Does the 6-MHz Channel Disappear?
 
Here’s something happening in the tech background that rattles the origins of television: The undoing of the 6-Megahertz channel spacing, common to broadcast and cable television since the 1940s.
What’s going on? Progress, in the form of advanced modulation and distribution techniques (here’s that migration to IP again) seeking to wring every literal bit of capacity on communications networks.

What's Coming Up in Cable Technology

By: Aug 27 2012 - 3:51pm

Last week’s email included a message from a friend who lives on the periphery of cable technology: “I was asked recently if I’d seen cable MSOs developing any new businesses, aside from home security, Skype and business services. I couldn’t think of any others - do you know of new technical products that are in early development stage?”

Where to start? Wireless seems a good place. Ever since mobile became mobile, the world has wondered about cable’s wireless play. Wall Street wants it, but only if it doesn’t cost a fortune to build. Consumers want it if it means taking your broadband with you, sans the $50-per-month fee charged by mobile carriers for a dongle that works half the time. Operators want it as a way to keep customers “sticky” to them in a hypercompetitive marketplace.

Step one was the Clearwire consortium, which continues to trundle along. The bigger action, though, is in mobile Wi-Fi hotspots. East Coasters already know about this, given the cable Wi-Fi happenings along the mid-Atlantic corridor. Cox Communications is now on board, so it’s a footprint that will widen.

Also of interest: Secondary SSIDs (service-set identifiers) inside wireless routers, inside homes. I’m in Comcast territory in Denver. I visit you, in another part of the country that’s also served by Comcast. On firing up the laptop, I’m automatically connected to your Wi-Fi feed, drawing bandwidth from a secondary SSID provisioned inside your router - but my usage counts against my account, not yours. That’s ultimately very handy for when high-bandwidth relatives are in town.

This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s an example of “early-development- stage” launches.

Then there’s the whole consumer-device scene and the APIs (application program interfaces) operators can and will use to extend their “service icons” into connected screens. Different devices contain different native abilities - witness the Cox demonstration of video navigation on a Sony PS3, which lets viewers control video playback with the joystick, frame by frame.

It’s hard to predict where and how this will go, but, it’s going. We’ve already seen our phones and tablets become the remote control for the TV. Those apps will evolve, such that you’re using the touch pad to swipe-navigate the TV screen - this is already happening in the U.K., with Sky’s iPad app. Or using hand gestures, a la Microsoft Xbox Kinect. Or with your voice.

So, Ms. J, there’s your answer. Happy to report that we’re just warming up here. Three years ago, I’d still be staring at your mail.



Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translationplease.com or multichannel.com/blog.

What Is Title 6 Video?

By: Jul 16 2012 - 1:17pm

Maybe this is happening to you, too. A conversation begins. It’s about over-the-top video, or usage-based broadband, or any of the tangents that go with the new world of video on TVs and screens not necessarily connected to a set-top box.

Then you hear it: “Title 6 video.” Here’s an example, from several batches of notes. “Look. To be a multichannel- video provider (MVPD), you have to comply with the Title 6 rules.” Here’s another: “Anyone with a video server at the edge of the network wants to think they’re an MVPD. But they’re not Title 6.”

And because “Title 6″ is a term that’s been around so long (nigh on 30 years), the natural reaction is to nod solemnly: Ah yes. Title 6.

Which raises the question: What is Title 6 video?

Short version: It’s an outgrowth of the Communications Act, and is the chapter that includes the Cable Act, etched in 1984. Title 1 is general info; Title 2 regulates common carriers; Title 3 applies to broadcasters; and so on up to Title 6, cable.

It mandates all the things one needs to do, in order to be a multichannel video provider. Or, in regulatory lingo, an MVPD.

Here’s a sampling of what’s in the Title 6 rules: Franchising. Closed captioning. Must-carry. Ownership. Emergency alerts. Blackouts. PEG (public, education and government) channels. Program access. Navigation devices.

There’s more, but it turns out that Title 6 is more dated than practical these days, given the volume and pace of technological change over the last 28 years. Why? Those rules were made at a time when signal paths were in silos, and few of them. Phone service came from the phone company over twisted pair. Cable TV came from cable operators over their plant.

These days, everything’s an app, with plenty of pathways into the home.

Should any guy with a video server at the edge of the network be considered an MVPD, without complying with Title 6 commitments? The knee-jerk answer is no. But maybe a better question is this: Rather than try to shoehorn old rules into a new scene, why not ask what’s to be expected from video providers?

There are those who would say that the over-the-top video community views such regulations as a tool kit, from which to help themselves to the assets of others. Take the good or doable parts - think program access and compulsory copyright. Leave the rest, like retransmission consent and the complexity of the Title 6 obligations.

That’s a very short look at a very complicated cog in the tech regulatory machinery. More to come.



Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

A Year Over The Top

By: Jul 23 2012 - 2:24pm

This week marks one year of sampling a large variety of over-the-top video hardware and software in a makeshift office lab. Why? To understand the reasons people cut the cable cord, or hang out on the “connected” side of today’s Internet-connected TVs. It seems like a good time to share some findings.

1. What I use the most of the over-the-top services: Amazon Prime. Why? Amazon was first to offer Downton Abbey season two, which I could watch on a Vizio screen at home while “getting steps” on the treadmill. (I am OCD about 10,000 steps per day, thanks to the Fitbit, to which I am wonderfully addicted.)

After that, and still on Amazon Prime: Tanked. Tanked is a family viewing activity, marathon-style - but, alas, the main TV in the house isn’t Internet-connected. So I brought home a Sony streamer, which was dissed at the lab for its clunky on-screen remote (it’s as clunky on the Sony PS3). But, it has Amazon Prime. The Tanked binging continued in the living room.

2. Observation: Be careful what you wish for, in terms of user experience. OTT apps like Netflix and Amazon, as well as cable-video apps like Comcast’s Xfinity TV, can use or not use various native features within each streaming device. This means the same app can behave differently from one screen to the next. (Maybe we’ll all just get used to this?)

When marathon-viewing Nurse Jackie on the Vizio screen, for instance, the Amazon app keeps track of episodes I’ve seen with a simple check mark. No such feature on the Sony streamer upstairs. Same app, same show, but you need to remember which episode you watched last.

The flip side of that, which comes with DLNA, is that any software-based video app can leverage native device features that are cool or handy.

Example: At the Cable Show in June, on a back wall of the CableNET area, Cox Communications showed how its Trio guide had taken advantage of a native feature inside a Sony connected TV, such that in-show navigation happens on a scroll bar, frame by frame. It looked great.

3. What I use the most at work: Comcast’s AnyPlay, fed by Motorola’s Televation box. Live, streaming cable TV on the iPad. Love it. Make it do trick-play, I’d love it even more.

That’s a short walk through a year’s worth of OTT-ing in the lab. Next time: What all that streaming did to the broadband meter; the puzzle of getting a signal to everything; and the multiplier on remote-control clutter.

Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

A Year Over The Top, Part 2

By: Jul 30 2012 - 2:45pm

Last week, we examined some of the notable consumer trends coming out of my makeshift over-the-top (OTT) video lab. This week, and as promised, a bit more - starting with the remote control clutter multiplier.

The window ledge in the lab is already piled with more than a dozen hard-plastic remotes. We’re all wearily familiar with the desire for fewer remotes, but with over-the-top TV, there’s a multiplier: Software-based remotes.

Nearly every gadget in the lab comes with a software version of its guide. Which means alongside the “hard clutter” of the remotes on the ledge is a lot of “soft clutter” of remotes on the iPad, Android and iPhone screens. (Somebody please tell me how to folder all of these remotes!)

Broadband usage in the lab: We all saw the kerfuffle, right before the Cable Show in May, about Netflix not liking Comcast’s foray into the Xbox. That’s the one where Xbox users can view subscription video via the Xfinity app, and the bits consumed don’t count against their broadband bit cap, which was upped to 300 Gigabytes per month.

Here at the lab, it’s a little hard to fathom using 300 Gigs. (I realize I will eat my hat for this someday.) Comcast’s online account tools show that we used 10 GB in April, 16 GB in May, and 9 GB in June. Granted, the lab only goes over the top on OTT video activities one day a week, when my trusty assistant, Sara, comes in to put the 15-plus boxes through their paces.

So last week, we turned everything on and kept it on. At press time, the meter had jumped from 10 GB to 22 GB - 8% of the cap - even though the Roku timed out sometime over the weekend. Extrapolating that, we’d spend maybe 60 GB a month if everything streamed constantly.

Lastly: Finding signal for everything is “nontrivial,” as my engineering friends would say. Granted, most people don’t fiddle around with a dozen gadgets, all for the purpose of consuming television. As this column has noted before, though, the more IP-connectable stuff you get, the more you’ll start thinking about signal.

In the case of the lab, this meant not just installing a second cable modem (IPv6!), but also an HDMI switch, to move around between the different devices. It’s not extraordinarily difficult, but it does involve a lot of futzing. Can someone hand me the remote?



Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at www.translation-please.com or www.multichannel.com/blog.

Move Over, Moore: It's Shannon's Law

By: Aug 6 2012 - 5:08pm

A few weeks ago, an engineering elder called to pose this bit of industrial wisdom: “For the last 20 years, we’ve seen the monetization of Moore’s Law. From here on out, we’ll see the monetization of Shannon’s Law.” Haven’t heard of Shannon? Welcome to this week’s translation.

First off, one important distinction: There are laws, and then there are “laws.” Think laws of gravity, motion, thermodynamics and physics here. Not legal laws, or laws of unintended consequences, or marketing lingo that sounds peppier with “law” in the title.

In that sense, Moore’s Law isn’t technically a law; Shannon’s Law is a law of physics. It’s a physical law, meaning it’s true, universal, simple, absolute and stable.

Moore’s Law is more of an economic observation, named for Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corp., who wrote a paper in 1965 stating that the number of transistors (processing power) within chips was doubling about every 18 months. It’s still true.

By contrast, and more relevant every “connected” day, is Shannon’s Law. It’s named for Claude Shannon, who did his work in the 1940s, 20 years before Moore’s.

Shannon’s Law defines “the theoretical maximum rate at which error-free digits can be transmitted over a bandwidth-limited channel in the presence of noise.” (It comes with an equation, but we’ll spare you the math.)

In other words, Shannon figured out a way to calculate how much stuff can be crammed over a broadband network, without problems, even when there is noise, which there always is.

The dramatic rise in broadband usage - upwards of 50% compound annual growth - is true on fixed and mobile networks. In London last week, some social media outlets got bogged down because of all the gadgetry trying to send pictures and videos. We are gunking up networks.

Which is why it’s important to be able to calculate throughput maximums on data networks. And to be able to ease the situation - by adding spectrum or mitigating noise.

In cable tech circles, invoking Shannon usually means you’re having a conversation about upstream (home to headend) signaling. It’s why there’s so much talk about advanced modulation and finding ways to make that slender spectral area carry more stuff.

Will Shannon’s Law get monetized like Moore’s Law did, with a fury of investment and development that lasts a half century? Let’s hope so, for the sake of clear connections and unclogged networks.



Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at www.translation-please.com or www.multichannel.com/blog.

The Tool That Sees Around Corners

By: Aug 13 2012 - 2:21pm

Innovation can happen in the strangest places. Latest example: a tool built from a tangent of the DOCSIS cable-modem specification, which lets cable operators find, map and fix network problems — before they affect consumers.

Up until now, technicians could see “green-yellow-red” notifications about network impairments, but not their precise location. (Squirrels and rats don’t typically tweet their whereabouts when chewing through wires.)

The source of the invention are the “pre-equalization” techniques within the DOCSIS specification (versions 1.1 and above), which anticipate and correct distortions between cable modems and the headend.

Turns out those same distortion “signatures” can be mined to triangulate where a problem is. On a map. Which makes this a tool that can see around corners.

Or, in tech terms, it means that every fielded cable modem becomes a network analyzer, a tool that goes for about $10K otherwise.

I saw the invention in action last week, when an engineering pal at Comcast (we’ll call him Larry, because that’s his name) showed me, on my New York-situated laptop screen, that the cable modems in my Denver office were working just fine. All green.

He then switched the screen to show the diagnostics from his house — an older home, with older wiring. Uh-oh: yellow lights. Why? Larry’s modem’s upstream transmit levels were huffing and puffing, trying to push the data through the aged wires.

That tool designed for customer-care people — plus one tailored to line techs and another that shows network health, by region — are all built on top of a foundational tool Comcast calls the “network scout.” (Internally, it also goes by “flux capacitor.”)

Next, Larry showed me a “ripple,” shorthand for a microreflection caused by an impedance mismatch. (Those happen when connectors aren’t connected right, or when coax gets kinked or squished.)

And then — poof! — he overlaid the ripple data onto a network map, showing major plant components (nodes, amplifiers). From there, he overlaid a street map, with the precise location of the fault.

The scout tool stems from a CableLabs effort called “Proactive Network Maintenance,” which was “productized” by Comcast. (Cox Communications, Charter Communications and others built or are building versions, too.)

Anything that can see around corners is spooky, in my book. Fixing problems before they occur? Spooky-cool.

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

Inside the Comcast RDK, Part Two

By: Apr 9 2012 - 4:39pm

This week’s Translation steps further into the parts of the Comcast “RDK” (reference development kit), the software effort aimed at shaving a year off the time it takes to launch new cable gateways, hybrid set-tops and all-Internet protocol hardware and services.

Quick refresher: RDK is a bundle of software drivers and source code that gets preloaded into chips so manufacturers can develop product more quickly. That means apps, services and everything related goes more quickly. Quickly is the goal of RDK.

In essence, the RDK outlines a “now-and- next” list of software items, where “now” means what’s in today’s digital set-tops: A CableLabs “Reference Implementation” (RI) for OCAP and Tru2way, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), a video proxy, media streamer and DTCP (Digital Transmission Copy Protection), for security.

The “next” parts of the RDK come from the IP (Internet-protocol) side of the world.

Recall that a huge driver for the RDK is to tap into the larger world of Internet developers instead of building complicated, cable-specific stuff.

For brevity, we’ll sidestep the familiar, “how things are now” components, which this column has covered every which way over the past decade.

Let’s look instead at the new stuff: Gstreamer, QT and webkit. We’ll start with “QT,” which people tend to say as a word: Cute. (No, really.) QT is a “windowing framework,” meaning it’s the traffic cop for everything that wants to get onto a screen.

And because nearly everything in software happens in stacks, the next one up in RDK is “webkit,” a browsing framework used under the hood of Safari, Chrome, and mobile environments like iOS (Apple) and Android (Google).

Including a browsing framework, notably, isn’t the equivalent of Internet browsing on TV. Rather, a browser framework knows how to do things like render HTML, parse incoming markup languages and access specific media types — so that a browser, as we know it, could work on top of it.

Then there’s Gstreamer — and here comes that “framework” again, this time for video. It’s what’s underneath the processing or raw audio and video files, so that they play out as intended. Handily, it’s a framework that plugs into multiple types of digital rights management (DRM).

In the olden days of right now, most of these activities are done on proprietary silicon that works differently, one chip vendor to the next. RDK exists to change that.

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog. 

Somebody Please Bring HD Voice to The U.S.

By: Apr 16 2012 - 2:39pm

Writing about something you have to hear to believe is as vexing, if not more, than writing about what you have to see to believe.

But even that comparison is a start.

Let’s assume that we all lived through the first days of HDTV. (Mine were at the Atlantic City Convention Center, on the boardwalk, in the early 1990s. The booth was draped in black cloth to keep the viewing area dark enough.)

If you’re like me, your first reaction to HDTV was something like this: “Wow. That’s better than my eyes can see.” (And, at the time, I had 20/10 vision.)

The same is true — and then some — for HD voice. It’s better than your ears can hear, even if you didn’t spend too many cumulative hours in front of the Marshall stacks at this-or-that concert. It sounds like the difference between any airline’s complimentary earbuds and Bose-grade earphones.

Trust me: You want this. It’s that good.

Why so good? The lingo of HD voice is a little bit bandwidth (”wideband” plays here), and a little bit codec (a tech sniglet for “coder/decoder”; the big one is G.722).

Bandwidth plus codec equals better audio resolution - just like it did for video resolution, in HDTV.

How much bandwidth? Not much, in relative terms: 7 kilohertz (kHz) for HD audio, compared to 3 MHz or more for one stream of HD video. (Refresher: To get to a “mega” from a “kilo,” add three zeroes.) But in voice terms, it’s nearly a doubling: Your phone today likely uses about 4 kHz for your conversations.

Physiologically, by spectrally stretching into higher and lower frequencies, the human ear can hear more. Going spectrally higher (to 7 kHz, from 4 kHz today) makes consonants sound clearer; dipping lower in the band (down to around 50 Hz, from 300 Hz on today’s phones) adds depth and clarity.

All of this brings to mind one of comedian Steven Wright’s classic observations: “I got a walkie-talkie. It doesn’t work.”

The good news is, with HD voice, even if only one phone is tricked out with an HD codec, call quality still improves. But the technology really sings with dual-codecs - one in your phone and one in mine. No more “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” No more “Say again?”

Six years ago, HD voice launched in parts of Europe, and especially France. Here in Colorado, the summer concert season is about to start (read: more potential hearing loss). Hint, hint.

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Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

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