Back in June, on the eve of NCTA’s annual conference, it was clear that a theme had emerged for The Cable Show.  As I wrote on this blog, we were entering “a new world in which Consumer Electronics, Information Technology and Hollywood” have come together into order to deliver our customers new and powerful ways of consuming entertainment and information.

To be more technical about it, as industry observer Leslie Ellis put it:

…we’re moving to a world where stuff can be done without set-top boxes, at least as they exist in hardware. Now, it’s set-tops; next, it’s gateways that bridge between set-tops and cable modems, and ultimately, it’s video delivered completely over IP, from the network, to the end devices.

I bring this up because NCTA’s President and CEO Michael Powell sent a letter last week to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski about these new developments and what they mean for our ability to achieve a fully competitive and innovative retail video device marketplace.

This issue has been discussed for some time, but 2011 has brought a host of services entering the marketplace.  See some of our previous posts:

• Consumers Reaping Benefits of Smart Video Device Revolution
• Connected TV… Here to Stay

All of that was before The Cable Show. As Michael Powell’s letter pointed out, the various demos and panels from our event help show how the cable industry “is providing American consumers with powerful, personal, and portable services and networks that support unprecedented mobility of content to multiple devices both in and out of the home.”

The Cable Show demonstrated that Congress’s and the Commission’s video device goals are already being achieved in the marketplace.  …there is broad-based momentum in the cable industry to deliver cable services to consumers on any device.

Today, consumers have more sources of video programming and content on more devices than ever before, and the choices are only growing through a variety of market-based approaches: smart TVs, iPads and other tablets, TV from the “cloud,” set-top boxes that can combine TV with Internet content, the growing role of home networking and connected devices. All of these approaches are playing a role.

As quoted in this write-up in Multichannel News, NCTA is suggesting that regulatory efforts intended to encourage innovation may instead impede.

“The problem that remains in this marketplace is not the need for a single guiding regulatory prescription,” like the FCC’s proposed AllVid solution, wrote Powell. “The marketplace is at a critical juncture, inviting participants to make major bets and even more major investments in technology to meet rapidly developing consumer demand with rapidly changing technological tools. This kind of innovation is about risk taking. The environment that invites the greatest risk taking is one with the certainty that regulators will not step in and displace new technologies or new investments.”

FOOTNOTE: There was a lot of activity at The Cable Show along these lines, but you get a taste of what’s happening in this area, watch some videos from The Park, such as the demos from Comcast, Cablevision and HBO.

We’ve already seen media coverage this week with headlines like “Web Running Out of Addresses.” If you’ve read reports like these, you’re aware of the Internet’s transition to a new set of IP addresses which will continue to connect the massive number of new computers, mobile phones and countless other gadgets.

This transition is due to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the organization responsible for handing out global IP addresses, having exhausted their supply of existing addresses.  Fortunately, the cable industry has been working for several years to prepare for the transition and to minimize the impact on Internet users.

(CableLabs today issued a press release: Cable Industry Is Well Positioned to Transition to Next Internet Protocol, IPv6.)

We’ve often noted that “the Internet” is a network of networks – a global communications platform with no single authority. This is exactly how it was designed to work from the beginning and Internet Protocol addresses are the key to this system.

Devices that are designed to interact with the Internet are assigned IP addresses so that messages can be sent and received.  Today’s Internet traffic today travels via the Internet Protocol version “IPv4.”  IPv4 has the capability to address about 4.3 billion devices which was originally thought to be plenty, but is now expiring because of the tremendous innovation and growth we’ve seen in devices that access the Internet.

IANA provides these IP addresses to five regional Internet registries (RIRs) around the world, who in turn hand out the addresses to Internet Service Providers (ISPs).  As IANA runs out of IPv4 address blocks, it is expected that the RIRs will hand out all of their IPv4 addresses later this year.  As a result, ISPs, who get their addresses from the RIRs, will not be able to get additional IPv4 addresses.

From IPv4 to IPv6

The solution to the IPv4 crunch is to transition to Internet Protocol version 6, which has a dramatically larger address space (128 address bits compared to the 32 address bits in IPv4).  This transition will include participation from content providers and websites, ISPs, equipment vendors, as well as consumers – in other words, all the parts of the entire Internet “ecosystem.”

Cable operators have also been taking the lead in encouraging others to transition to IPv6.  Last Fall, NCTA and CableLabs held an educational IPv6 summit with television content companies and cable operators.  Cable operators, along with CableLabs and NCTA, have been aggressively working with different Internet organizations such as NANOG (The North American Network Operators’ Group) and the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force).  And cable operators are now working to implement IPv6 across their broadband networks.  Comcast just yesterday announced that it is conducting the first North American test of IPv6 with a group of DOCSIS cable modem users in Colorado (Also see past posts about IPv6 on Comcast’s blog).

To help evangelize the transition, on June 8, 2011, the Internet Society (ISOC) is promoting “World IPv6 Day,” to encourage all Internet participants “test drive” IPv6 for a 24-hour period.  Cable plans to participate in World IPv6 Day.

Look for more updates about the transition to IPv6 from CableLabs and NCTA.

If you were one of the 145,000 visitors to the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, you couldn’t have swung an iPad without hitting one of the thousands of Internet-enabled “smart” TV and other devices that are transforming the consumer video marketplace.

The proliferation of these devices, plus a whole host of new business arrangements between “traditional” video providers and device makers, highlight how consumers are enjoying ways to view video programming on multiple devices when and where they want it.  A previous post on this year’s CES highlighted some of these exciting new choices.

To highlight this remarkable growth and urge the Commission to refrain from adopting new tech mandates that could stifle this innovation, NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow today sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on the Commission’s “AllVid” proceeding (see some background here).

In his letter, Kyle pointed to the dozens of recent business announcements which have “emerged to meet consumer demand without any technology mandate or regulatory guarantee.”

The fact that tens of millions of tablets, game consoles, Internet-connected TVs, and other smart, video-capable devices have been sold and will be sold means that the Commission no longer needs to ‘create’ a retail market for navigation devices…  Instead, the Commission should focus on “keeping the runway clear” of impediments and unnecessary rules that could slow these exciting developments.

The growing list of marketplace developments is impressive, and getting longer each week:

• Video services from Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon are being offered as retail applications on televisions, tablets, PCs, and gaming devices, including those manufactured by Samsung and Sony.
• More than 118 million Internet-connected TVs are expected to be sold by 2014, and competing smart video devices and game consoles offer video services from MVPDs and over-the-top video providers including Netflix, YouTube and Hulu.
• Several video providers are now offering “TV Everywhere” online services for Internet-connected devices without the need for a “gateway,” and MVPD set-top boxes are beginning to combine TV and web content.
• Secure home networks are being used to collect video content from a variety of sources to be shared with Internet-connected TVs, game consoles, PCs, and mobile devices.
• New video interfaces are emerging as smart phones are blurring the lines between the mobile and big screen experience, and new digital rights technology will provide consumers new ways to buy content from multiple vendors and enjoy it on a variety of Internet connected-devices.
• Video providers, including Charter, Cox and Suddenlink, and device manufacturers like TiVo are working together on unique programming distribution agreements, combining the retail device and MVPD service experience.

This combination of strong competition between multichannel video providers –which includes cable, DirecTV & DISH, AT&T’s U-verse & Verizon’s FiOS – and the emergence of so many new ways of viewing video through broadband – Hulu, Netflix, Roku, Boxee, Apple TV – means that the pace of innovation will likely continue. But McSlarrow warned that we must ensure that this diversity of choice not be “undermined by unnecessary one-size-fits-all and other harmful government technology mandates.”

Instead of the Commission mandating specific technical requirements that could stifle innovative in this dynamic marketplace, McSlarrow argued that cable’s consumer device video principles – which were first submitted to the FCC in March 2010 – could be used to assess and assure innovation and progress in the video service and video devices markets.

The iPad analogy at the beginning of this post may be an exaggeration but when the National Broadband Plan was adopted last year, the iPad hadn’t even been released.  If that doesn’t demonstrate how fast the marketplace changes, I don’t know what does.

As we’ve argued before, during a period of such innovation and experimentation, it’s unclear what approaches lie on the horizon or which ones will ultimately succeed.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the cable industry has deployed switched digital video (SDV) as a means of conserving bandwidth, allowing us to provide better and more services to our customers.  As the FCC examines the future of set-top boxes and the current CableCARD regime, TiVo has raised a question about whether the Tuning Adapter (which it helped develop) is a satisfactory approach to enable consumers with TiVo one-way devices to access cable programming delivered via SDV.

We’ve already responded via filings of our own  – making the points that Tuning Adapters are generally working and the TiVo proposed “fix” doesn’t withstand scrutiny  – but I wanted to take some time to explain where we think TiVo gets it wrong. (Coverage of this battle of filings can be found at Multichannel News and Light Reading.)

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Several major cable operators are making new deployments of switched digital video – see here and here – which provides a timely opportunity to explain how SDV works and how consumers will benefit.

Standard cable service, both analog and digital, works on a “broadcast” model, in which every available channel is sent to every subscriber all of the time, regardless of what is actually being watched. Sending more channels than you’re actually watching just takes up more of the capacity on the cable pipe – capacity that could be used for other important purposes.

As this article succinctly puts it:

One of the primary benefits of SDV is that it frees up bandwidth because it only delivers the channel a customer is viewing.

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