Prior to the official starting gun for the sixth edition of TelcoTV, Cox Communications’ Steve Necessary addressed the IPTV crowd during one of the three pre-conference workshops.
“I feel like Michael Vick addressing the American Kennel Club,” Necessary joked to the TelcoTV attendees who were in Atlanta for the show.
Necessary was on hand to provide the Cox and cable perspective on IPTV. Customers, Necessary said, don’t care about the technology that delivers their applications and services. Instead they want more and better of what they have, including faster broadband speeds, more o- demand and more HD channels.
“They (customers) don’t care about technology and marketing; what matters are the applications,” he said. “They like reliability, quality, price and convenience; technology is secondary to most (consumers).”
To date, IPTV hasn’t been able to deliver a new product, with new revenues streams and new operational costs that are a vast improvement over what the current MPEG-2 over QAM infrastructure can do for cable, according to Necessary.
Necessary said that IPTV is “a means of distributing video and it’s a Network Layer,” and not inclusive of other technologies such as MPEG-4.
Cox and the cable industry are working on providing blended service applications that cross over the traditional silos of voice, video and data. He said an internal mantra at Cox is “any content, any time, to any device.”
Cable will be able to combat IPTV applications and services by implementing the following: DOCSIS 3.0 enabling 100 Mbps downstream speeds on the Internet, 256 QAM deployments, node splits, 870 MHz and 1 GHz architectures, analog reclamation, switched digital video (SDV), and optimized compression.
Cox has already deployed SDV in its Northern Virginia system two months ago and Necessary said the company expects to have it deployed in two more locations before the end of the year.
Necessary also went over the OpenCable Platform’s ability to enable services such as Caller ID on TVs, voting, polling and reading e-mail on TV.
As another example of merging interactive services, he pointed out Comcast’s recent implementation of TiVo software on Motorola DVRs in the Boston area, and said Cox is planning on a similar deployment with TiVo at some point next year.
Necessary briefly outlined CableLabs’ Project Canoe as a unified platform that brings value to advertisers by targeting content to viewers.
“Canoe develops a consolidated infrastructure, which is an important part of our value chain,” he said.
“Advertisers will be able to make one purchase with a cable entity instead of 20 or 30 purchases with different cable operators.”
When asked by an audience member what the difference will be between cable and telco video providers five years from now, Necessary said there wouldn’t be much in terms of the services.
“Cable started out as lots of little franchises that got bought up,” he said. “Along the way, it became a part of towns because of the local franchises. It’s something we never fixed, so now we can feature it. Cable is now respected in many of those communities that it serves, but whether that’s enough to compete with lower prices remains to be seen, but the services will be comparable.”
