LOS ANGELES — Panelists here at the SCTE’s Emerging Technologies conference Tuesday, discussing cable’s evolution to the "hyperconnected" network, engaged in a guessing game: How long will analog cable TV channels stick around?

After all, you can’t even buy an old-fashioned analog TV anymore. Those big, fat analog signals that suck up a whole 6 Megahertz of spectrum are just a waste, right?

But some said the analog signals will live on, perhaps for decades to come. "Personally I believe there will always be analog channels — 30 years from now there will still be analog channels," said Adi Bonen, chief technology officer of Scopus Video Networks.

Cable is implementing new bandwidth-optimization techniques like switched digital video, and new technologies like Harmonic’s HectoQAM concept promise to allow much more efficient delivery of personalized TV services, he said. Given that, "there will be enough spectrum to do everything we need to do, so why eliminate anything?"

Of course, the FCC is requiring cable to continue to transmit analog signals of broadcasters who opt for must-carry through 2012, three years after the digital TV transition. But after that, the free market will take over — and whether to continue offering analog cable channels becomes a customer-service question.

Richard Gasloli, Comcast Cable’s senior vice president of strategic planning and group technical advisor for communications, said, "I think analog is here for the foreseeable future… The question is, How much will still be around."

My guess: It will be a long, slow pullback on analog TV. As cable operators have noted, being able to deliver "legacy" TV is something cable and telcos can’t do.

And obsolete technologies have a stubborn way of refusing to fade away. Hundreds of 8-track tapes are for sale on eBay, for example. Excuse me while I pop a movie into my Betamax machine!

Is Comcast planning to put videocameras in its DVRs so it can spy on its customers?

Well, no. But a blogger from NewTeeVee suggested as much after his offhand chat with Comcast SVP Gerard Kunkel, setting off a ripple of near-incredulous coverage from other media (see these pickups by DSLReports, NY Times and PCWorld).

The idea, it seems, is that Comcast is experimenting with a camera-enabled set-top, which would recognize the "body forms" of people sitting in front of the TV (according to the NewTeeVee blogger). That would let the Comcast DVR pull up your favorite channels, prerecorded programs and preferences, and serve up targeted ads based on user profiles.

Neat? Not to the NewTeeVee guy. His paranoid take: "I can’t trust Comcast with BitTorrent, so why should I trust them with my must-be-kept-secret, DVR-clogging addiction to Keeping Up with the Kardashians?"

Kunkel later wrote to NewTeeVee in an attempt to correct the implication that Comcast would be doing anything other than displaying someone’s favorites when they sit down in front of the TV: "I want to be clear that in no way are we exploring any camera devices that would monitor customer behavior."

Couple of points worth noting here.

1. It’s not even a new idea. Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny! pointed out that TiVo applied for a patent in 2005 on a system that would let remote controls identify individuals via RFID chips, which would be associated with a person’s profile/preferences. That way, your shows would pop up when your RFID tag informed the TiVo of your presence.

Microsoft goes further with an application for a patent in July 2007 for a camera-based system that would ID the viewer and serve up targeted ads based on an anonymized profile. 

2. Service providers already have reams of data about you. I don’t want to set anyone off in a hysterical fit of panic, forcing them to flee to a dark cave wearing a tin-foil hat. But here is the spooky reality: They already can tell when you watch the Kardashians! 

And here is the mundane reality: They don’t care, per se. Except to aggregate that viewing behavior for those who buy and sell ads, the mechanism that fuels most of the TV industry. The eventual goal is to serve up ads targeted to individuals (e.g., Microsoft’s idea in previous point), through developments like Project Canoe. Shhhh: don’t let NewTeeVee know about this.

3. Anything that hints of personal data collection gets some people very, very worried. Comcast gets zinged all the time in the consumer press/blogosphere for having lame user interfaces, poor customer service, etc., etc. Kunkel attempted to describe what to me sounds like a pretty cool feature as a TV viewer — and Comcast gets instantly hammered over imagined privacy concerns. 

Sure, the idea of the TV "knowing" who you are probably sounds a little spooky. But remember how weird it was when caller ID first came out, and the person you were calling answered the phone already knowing it was you? I’m starting to understand why product-development folks keep ideas on the drawing board away from feverish public speculation.

Sex! Drugs! Reliable phone service!

Time Warner Cable has launched Fame Star!, a viral-video site to promote its triple play that lets anyone upload their own photos and create a one-minute mock celebrity exposé. 

Just type in your name, choose your gender, pick a story arc with varying levels of success, scandal and tragedy and select whether your character is based in New York, Los Angeles or Dallas.

 
Et voilà! Your "biopic" is ready — preceded by a 20-second ad promoting Time Warner Cable’s services. 

Lisa Stockmon, vice president of corporate marketing for Time Warner Cable, said the campaign was patterned after the “pop-culture intrusion” of other successful mashup-video sites, such as OfficeMax’s ElfYourself.com, which lets visitors paste their own photos on dancing Christmas elves. 

Fame Star! will run through the end of the year and could be extended further, Stockmon said.

“We can update it based on the economy and what happens with the elections,” she said. “We have a lot of flexibility in what we can do with it.” 

And how will TWC prevent the site from being abused? Stockmon said Fame Star! is being monitored by staff members and offensive words are automatically prevented from being inserted into the videos.

Some of the feedback I’ve heard on our cover story last week about "cable cutters" – people who’ve cancelled cable TV, satisfied with what they’re able to procure online and over the air – has been along the lines of: It’s a fringe movement that MSOs really shouldn’t worry about.

So what if a few nerds are going through the trouble to hook up their PCs to their televisions? (See Breaking Free from the Nov. 3 issue.) By and large, according to some programmers, online video outlets like Hulu and iTunes are additive to TV viewing — not cannibalistic. Nielsen numbers show that hours spent watching TV keep climbing, not declining.

And hey, even if there are people opting out of cable TV, the operators still get their $50 or $60 per month on broadband service, which by the way has made Hulu, Joost, YouTube, Veoh and others possible in the first place.

Fringe movements, though, sometimes go mainstream.

The trend, nascent and tiny though it may be, has a few big cable operators worried. On a CTAM Summit ‘08 panel this week, Peter Stern, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at Time Warner Cable, said programmers ought to provide some type of exclusive Internet distribution rights to their affiliates instead of undermining the model by offering it online for free.

“The question of whether broadband video upends the cable business lies with the programmers,” said Stern (see TWC’s Stern Urges Exclusive Web-Video Deals).

Yes, video viewing on PCs is a different use case than watching it on the living-room TV. But there are a growing number of paths for Internet-delivered video to televisions, as Stern pointed out.

Comcast, on the other hand, has embraced Web video and is chugging along with Fancast, its Hulu-fueled video destination. The Comcast strategy is to (eventually) provide value in bridging the gap between the the Internet and traditional cable TV (e.g. scheduling DVR from the Web, play Internet-delivered content on the TV).

RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, speaking on the closing CEO panel at the CTAM Summit yesterday, said Internet video distribution presents more of a "creeping" threat to the pay-TV model, rather than a massive frontal assault: "All of a sudden, kids graduate from college and they’re happy to use iTunes and Hulu and they don’t buy multichannel video — it’s subtle."

To compete in this landscape, MSOs must provide context around the content, Jeffrey Rayport, chairman of marketing consulting firm Marketspace, said in his Monday keynote at CTAM conference. By that he means social networking, video sharing and recommendation features. In Rayport’s shorthand: If Cable 1.0 was connectivity, and Cable 2.0 was content, then Cable 3.0 is context.

That makes sense, and I am sure we’ll see cable operators develop interactive services to enhance the TV viewing experience along these lines (e.g., the hooks between Fancast and Comcast’s cable VOD and linear TV). 

But I think perhaps the most disruptive effect of Internet TV distribution is this: It explodes the cable channel-bundling model. Content online is available a la carte – in the embeddable/shareable/electronic sell-through models that have emerged – and distributors are re-bundling it together in new ways (e.g., Joost’s "groups" allow members to essentially program their own channels).

Note that the music industry has been altered as much by iTunes’ a-la-carte pricing as it has by piracy. 

On the Internet, people are "self-programming" their TV experiences. They like the control and the personalization they have. And, the cable-cancellers I talked to also like the fact that they aren’t forced to pay for channels they never watch. The Web is producing a world of a-la-carte TV options, and that may be the most serious long-term threat here.

You know the maxim "content is king"? A new anti-piracy coalition that officially launched yesterday is treating Internet content more like a presidential candidate.

In this political season, now comes Arts+Labs, an ostensibly bipartisan advocacy group created by two former political operatives: Mike McCurry, the one-time Clinton White House spokesman and anti-Net Neutrality lobbyist, from the Democratic side; and Mark McKinnon, ex-advisor to McCain who bowed out of that campaign after Obama won the Dems’ nom, from the Republican camp. (They shoulda called their group "MMMM.")

Their first patrons include Viacom, NBC Universal, AT&T, Cisco and Microsoft, which for various reasons of self interest are hoping to build awareness that content piracy is bad — bad!

True to form, these Beltway guys are attacking the problem of pirated Web content as if they were waging a political campaign: Extol the virtues of your side, and (maybe more important) slam the opposition.

The opponents in this case are those blackguards who traffic in illegally copied material. 

According to the McCurry-McKinnon spin, downloading unauthorized versions of songs, movies or TV shows not only picks the pockets of humble artists but also subjects your computer to "net pollution" like viruses and "threatens to congest and delay the network for all consumers."

McCurry, in their press release, says one of the group’s goals is to give consumers "confidence that they are safe from viruses, hackers, malware, illegal file trafficking and other net pollution that puts them at risk."

Well, there are some half-truths in there. The digital kleptomaniacs who use BitTorrent or whatever to steal songs or movies are savvy enough to know how to avoid infecting their computers.

Anyway, on the other side of this hearts-and-minds campaign is the process of burnishing the client’s image: The Arts+Labs site links to approved sources of content, such as Hulu: "all free video, all the time." 

It remains to be seen how effective this effort will really be. Internet users, of course, will vote with their mice.