While the top executives at the Cable Show last week were jockeying to cut deals to distribute major cable networks over the Web (for paying customers), the engineers in the background were talking about a completely different approach to getting cable programs onto computers.
Right now, video signals are transmitted over cable systems in a method called QAM, which is designed specifically for set-top boxes and cable-ready TVs. Computers and other digital devices need special hardware add-ons in order to receive the cable programming.
But what happens when you want to watch the Food Channel in the kitchen, and (horrors) you only have a laptop there?
New technology will let cable companies feed programs onto your home network in the standard formats used by the Internet. That way you could simply run video software, such as Windows Media Player or a special program given to you by your cable company, to watch any show on your cable system on your PC, game console or smartphone.
“Your computer will be your alternate screen in your house, or it could be your primary screen if you want that,” said Peter Percosan, a partner in the San Francisco consulting firm Digital-strategy who works closely with the cable business of Texas Instruments.
Last month, Virgin Media, the big British cable company, announced it was developing this sort of system, using technology from Motorola. Mr. Percosan said that four major cable companies in the United States, which he declined to name, are designing this sort of television-to-computer link.
Why bother with this when people are watching shows on the Internet? For one thing, not every show on your cable system will be on the Web, even with the new deals being negotiated. Feeding your cable system onto your home network would let you watch everything, including live news and sports, from any device. Moreover, the video quality delivered by a cable system is likely to be higher than Web-based video for a good long time.
The technology that converts cable video into Internet formats will allow other new services as well. For example, you could download cable shows into portable devices to take with you. (Of course, the business types have at least as much work to do to enable that sort of service as the engineers.) This approach is also used by some of the “whole home” video recorder systems, which store programs on a hard drive on one cable box, say in the living room, and send it over a home network if you want to watch a recorded show on a TV in the bedroom.
These tricks can be accomplished with two very different technologies, with two very different implications for the future. The quick and easy approach doesn’t change the cable network at all. Rather, a souped-up cable modem called a “transport gateway” converts the video signal from the QAM standard used on cable systems to Internet Protocol to send over a home network.
Some cable systems, however, are talking about a much more ambitious approach. They are planning to send signals all the way from their central offices to your home by Internet Protocol. This will take changes in the cable company’s back offices, but should be more flexible in the long term.
This is not an all-or-nothing proposition, by the way. Cable companies can take a portion of their capacity and convert it to Internet format video, just as they convert some today to their broadband data service.
Why should you care? Because ultimately this is what is needed to move from a broadcast world — where you have a choice of a few hundred available channels — to one where your cable system will let you watch any program you want when you want to watch it. (Sort of like the Internet, huh?)
Right now, cable systems do offer video-on-demand programs, but that is done by devoting some channels just to video-on-demand use. (When you order that pay-per-view movie, you get a whole channel all to yourself.) Current cable systems don’t have the capacity to allow every person in a neighborhood to watch a different show at the same time. An Internet-based network could do that, some top cable engineers argue.
The more I learn about the inner workings of how the cable networks have been rebuilt, the more I see how flexible they are and how much capacity they have for all sorts of nifty services. Yes, fiber to the home has even more capacity, and it doesn’t have a few of the eccentricities of cable. But we have already invested $150 billion to build the cable network we have (with a lot of fiber running to each neighborhood), so it’s nice to know it is not obsolete yet.
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