Panelists Michael Adams, from Tandberg Television, and Mark Tubinis, from Cedar Point Communications, were tasked with finding ways to extend the current network architectures during the morning engineering session.
And they had to do so with Mike Hayashi, Time Warner Cable’s executive vice president, being the “reactor” to their presentations, which led to him saying he felt like Simon Cowell from “American Idol.”
Adams spoke about taking advantage of the back office systems cable operators already have deployed when empowering new services and devices across three screens instead of creating a separate silo for wireless services and applications. Cable operators already know their customers’ preferences from their set-top boxes and phone service. By creating “follow functions” for a TV Everywhere-type service, they can create stickiness for their subscribers while also providing them with a better user experience.
The existing back office system could also be used to make sure that subscribers aren’t abusing their TV Everywhere passwords and user names by posting them on Facebook or passing them along to friends, Adams said.
Hayashi noted that while Adams took more of a video approach in his presentation, Tubinis came at the problem from a telecommunications approach during his presentation on creating “fused services.”
Tubinis’ concept of fused services included providing a personalized experience that blends high-definition voice, high-definition video and high-speed data for real-life entertainment services, as well as co-mingled communications services. Examples of fused services were bringing Internet widgets to TV screens or tying phones in with TVs via visual voicemails.
Technologies that would be used for the fused services included IMS and PacketCable 2.0, according to Tubinis. There also needs to be unified user interfaces, regardless of the device or service, and cable should take advantage of “HD everything” for things like guide icons so that customers can rapidly understand what they want to select on a guide.
Hayashi asked how the two concepts would play together, and Adams said that while back office systems are currently implemented largely for video and data, further work would need to be done with the home subscriber services that Tubinis spoke of, but it could be melded with the billing systems over time.
Adams also said cable operators need to centralize billing systems to improve efficiencies for on-demand services, instead of each system tracking and billing assets on its own.
“Cable operators have the IP backbones in place to support that (centralized) infrastructure,” Adams said.
