The industry’s technical ranks descend upon Atlanta today, and by the looks of the sessions, workshops and meeting requests, this year’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo is going to be another jargon doozy.

Starting with other current events: If you happened to catch last Wednesday’s test of the national Emergency Alert System (hint: pretty glitchy), and wondered how that whole thing gets fixed to work correctly, details will abound in a Thursday session entitled “EAS Using CAP: IPAWS From End-to-End.”

Translation: EAS, obviously, is the Emergency Alert System. “CAP” stands for “Common Alerting Protocol” and “IPAWS” has nothing to do with the what’s at the end of the appendages of your cat, dog or ferret. (Although the inventors could get credit for almost anthropomorphizing a term.)

“IPAWS” stands for “Integrated Public Alert and Warning System” and is the new way of handling national emergency alerts. Equipment manufacturers are under mandate from the Federal Communications Commission to get their stuff in shape by the end of June 2012.

As for vendor fare: The term that cropped up with the most frequency in a happy barrage of jargon-studded meeting requests from vendors is CDN — content distribution networks. (Some people say “content delivery networks.” Same thing.) Here’s such a missive: “The product suite includes a unified origin server and unified edge server … and transmuxing capabilities to reduce the complexities of delivering multiscreen video.”

CDNs are all about finding efficient ways to deliver live and linear video using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) streaming – think Apple HLS, Adobe HDS and Microsoft Smooth Streaming. They work by plucking requested content from the server that’s geographically closest to the viewer. And they’re big, big, big, in terms of cable engineering to-do lists.

Also on the docket: “FTTT,” for “fiber to the tower,” a critical component for those MSOs dabbling in the lucrative and growing work of hauling cellular traffic for carriers; “DASH,” an MPEG suffix that stands for “Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP”; and “layer one multicast over DWDM,” where “DWDM” stands for “dense wave-division multiplexing.”

And that’s just a tiny sampling of what’s floating in the tech soup this week in Atlanta. Ahh, can’t you just taste it? (Don’t answer that.)

The great thing about Cable-Tec Expo is that everything is a deep dive, so if you’re going, be ready to take really good notes. And if you’re not going, fear not — technology editor Todd Spangler and I are, and we’ll be translating the scene back to you in the days and weeks to come.

Just about a year ago, word emerged of a way to buy and play movies electronically - but as effortlessly as we do DVDs, and before them, VCR tapes. Buy it, put it in the machine, play it.

The reason it’s simple to play a videotape in any VCR or any DVD in any DVD player - no matter what - is that the war about how it works happened ahead of time, and ended in standards. Beta vs. VHS; HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray. In each case, one way of displaying copyright-protected video titles became the way.

Standards didn’t happen in the digital marketplace for video. No standards means no effortless way for consumers to buy digital video. It means fragmentation, which creates confusion, which smites the digital video marketplace.

Think about it: You or your family might have accounts with iTunes, Netflix, Hulu Plus, and maybe an Amazon locker for the DVDs you bought there. It’s a lot of logins to remember, just to get at a video you bought.

Fast forward to last July, when a consortium emerged, seeking to fix the problem: the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE). In it are the majors in retailers (electronic and tactile), movie studios (all but Disney still), gadget makers (all but Apple) and service providers (cable, satellite, telco.)

Their answer is the consumer-facing brand that is Ultra- Violet. The first major phase of it came out this month.

What’s in it: A digital rights locker, protected by five flavors of DRM (digital rights management). Also: More than 75 APIs (application program interfaces) for use to develop video storefronts, and to handle interoperability between the DRMs. It’s all managed by Neustar.

Let’s start with the digital rights locker itself. It’s nothing like Davey Jones’ locker, or anything big and heavy with a brass padlock. (Sigh.) It’s a room full of specialized servers somewhere in Virginia. It’s a cloud, in that sense, where Neustar manages rights and licenses. It doesn’t hold content.

The digital rights locker - called The Coordinator, in DECE-speak - is SAML-based. “SAML” stands for Security Assertion Markup Language, and is the login part: Are you who you say you are? (Prove it.) Are you authorized and is your credit good? If you login to your bank, it’s likely that SAML is behind it. People tend to say it as a word - rhymes with trammel.

As Neustar opens the doors of its digital locker, it’s the five DRMs that are the big deal, technologically. Until now, there’s been no “DRMs ‘R’ Us” way to accommodate the different choices already playing out in the marketplace.

The APIs, released by Neustar to UltraViolet and its 70-plus member constituents on June 27, are aimed at a major blemish of open standards: stifled innovation. If everyone uses the same ingredients and recipe, how do they innovate?

That’s why there are about 80, at launch, so as to satisfy the initial needs of the DECE ecosystem.

Watch next for that gray-and-purple UVVU logo to enter your digital world. Also, more licenses and specs. Ultimately, it’s one login, for all your digital stuff, to use whenever and wherever you are.

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

These days, in the world on online things, it seems that everything wants to “federate.” Federated authentication; federated social networking; federated encoding. Clouds, apps, domains; libraries, servers, databases. All are apparent candidates for federation.

Try it yourself. Do an online dictionary lookup of the term (or any other). What pops up? In my case, a definition, and, to my slightly creeped-out surprise, a thumbnail-sized photo of my dog, Stella. Huh?

This is federation in action, as it turns out: Stella turned seven this month, so I set her photo as my Facebook profile picture. Apparently, Merriam-Webster.com and Facebook are “federated” - look up a term, get the definition, and the option to post it and a comment to your status.

To federate, then, in an online sense, is to pool certain resources - either to make a more tricked-out, unified consumer experience, or to make it more efficient for the underlying piece parts to unify into a whole.

Obviously, this is not a new concept. In the tactile, nondigital world, we’ve seen this before. Individual states federated into the United States. Before that, individual colonies federated into states.

In cable, the newest addition to the “federation” buzz is the content-delivery network, or CDN. CDNs come from the language set that is the industry’s transition to Internet protocol as a delivery environment for video.

In a big oversimplification, CDNs use fiber backbones and video-size (read: big) servers to ingest and hierarchically distribute streams of video to the mass of things in our lives that don’t necessarily get signal through a set-top box, but can connect to video signals over an Internet connection - PCs, laptops, tablets, phones.

Comcast built its own CDN; Time Warner Cable currently outsources its CDN activities. The rest of the industry, right now, in mid-summer 2011, is examining its options.

For small to midsized operators, it’s a real conundrum: Local and regional fiber rings are justifiable to consolidate headends and increase reliability. But augmenting them with a national web of video-centric servers and software, when signal collection is already working just fine the old way (satellite)? Last I checked, money still didn’t grow on trees. Which is why there’s so much buzz - mostly from vendors, so far - about finding ways to link regionally, pool networks and federate into a national CDN. An ambitious concept, to be sure.

So far, it’s just buzz. But it’s a buzz that grows louder day by day, just like when you take the lid off a beehive.

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

One of the big-three reasons commonly cited as cause for going “more IP,” and eventually “all-IP,” is the notion of “service velocity” — new-tech talk for getting more stuff to market more quickly. As in, ditching the time-tested “one new thing every 18 months” plan, long an unfortunate shackle of the set-top-based digital video world.

Rather than trudge yet again through the depressing realities about why things take so long in today’s world, let’s look at what puts the “velocity” into new-service rollouts.

This probably doesn’t come as a big surprise: Turns out it has a lot to do with the tsunami of software-based everything that’s making the workplace, and people, more efficient.

Talk to the people whose work it is to bridge between now and next, and specifically service velocity. They’re almost always IT/information technology people. Chances are high that you’ll hear two terms pop up again and again: Agile programming, and waterfall programming. “Waterfall” is old world; “agile” is new world. Proponents on each side tend to snark on the other.

Here’s some examples, from recent notes: “Waterfall is a disaster … you get these designs that aren’t influenced by reality.” And (puffed out with pride): “We run an agile development shop.”

My personal favorites: “Agile is the only way you can keep track of all the sh#t that’s going on in the network and at the end points,” counterpointed by “Agile, tiger-teams, it’s all a bunch of crap.”

“Waterfall” coding goes like this: You need to roll out a new video feature. After it’s designed, by the design team, it goes to the quality assurance team. Then to the solutions, integration and test team. If that’s all good, it gets released. Waterfall time is measured in double-digit months - and heaven forbid something changes along the way.

(Things that take a long time always remind me of a favorite joke. MSO to vendor: “Great! When can I have it!” Vendor: “In six months.” MSO: “Six months from when?” Vendor: “From every time you ask.”)

Agile programming is different. It splits the coding workload into chunks, which are constantly shipping, written by small teams that work in twoweek “sprints.” Changes are assumed, meaning that time is reserved to add stuff in, if requested.

None of this is new, by the way. In the world of computer science, it’s an old saga. A Google search on “agile v. waterfall programming” returned 540,000 results. Books are written on it; seminars are taught about it. It’s new to us because software is eating the world - and to survive and thrive, we need to know what and how software eats.

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

In the world of professional writing, there exists a pecking order when it comes to assignments. In mainstream newspapers, cub reporters get the fire beat.

In tech writing, it varies. I worked next to a guy in the early ’90s who took on “why are pedestals green?” to avoid the annual fleet-management roundup.Likewise for test equipment, and, since digital, DRM - digital rights management. Why? High volumes of multisyllabic jargon; triply nested acronyms; religious wars about software-based cryptography. All that, and for years, nobody really was using it.

That’s about to change. DirecTV announced its plan to use DRM made by NDS on Aug. 31. MSO technologists readying their Internet-protocol video strategies count the transition from conditional access to DRM as part of what they need to plan, build and provision.

It all feels rather cusp-ish, here on the brink between summer and fall of 2011.

For that reason, here’s a lay of the land, in these calm-before-the-storm DRM days:

DRM is about controlling more than one state. Digital set-tops, in a security sense, are one-trick ponies: On the condition that you’re a subscriber, you get access to the programming. Encryption is applied to protect stuff in transit. DRM, by contrast, wraps protection around the video asset, to serve multiple business cases - not just transit.

For MSOs, it’s about picking a system to protect content transmitted in IP, while figuring out how to deal with assets that get their DRM wrappers elsewhere. Say you’ve bonded a dozen or so DOCSIS channels, planks for a simulcast of your linear and on-demand lineups, in IP. That’s when you pick your DRM. At the same time, content will come inevitably in a format that’s been “DRM’d” elsewhere, earlier in the path.

What you buy are key management services and keep-it-fresh services. Surprise, surprise: DRM is a software thing. Buying it means buying the servers that manage the keys back and forth, to unlock the assets. Or, as one DRM tech friend says, “You buy the thing that runs the filter and flips the bits.”

It’s a pretty crowded vendor community. Surprisingly or not, the two biggies of the conditional access “duopoly” - Cisco Systems and Motorola - aren’t high on the buzz meter that is DRM. It’s super-crowded, though, with at least a half dozen big contenders. Welcome to the open-source world. Speaking of which, one of the questions about what will happen in the looming DRM heyday is what Google will do with its December 2010 acquisition of Widevine. Making its DRM open and free would have a predictable affect on the DRM marketplace.

Revocation’s still a bitch. Ask anyone involved in conditional access what the biggest hurdle was in getting those foundational security technologies deployed. Much like now, the muck of it was in the contracts, not in the actual technology - meaning figuring out who finally agrees to provide indemnification in the event of a security breach.

If history repeats, this is precisely when it goes from “fun” to “everything’s fun - until someone loses an eye!”

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