Visit Alticast at TV of Tomorrow 2013

Alticast is proud to be a sponsor of and speaking at TV of Tomorrow 2013, which takes place June 25th- 26th in San Francisco.

Stop by Alticast's itvTEA stand for a coffee, then stroll over to watch Alticast's Susan Crouse speak on the panel "Open to Innovation: Enabling the Evolution of Pay TV".  Here is a description:

Following on the heels of the Cable RDK Fireside, this session will bring together leading technology vendors to discuss how they are adapting to meet the evolving needs of pay-TV operators, as those operators adopt open-source technologies and move beyond the set-top box to embrace multiple connected platforms and enhance their traditional content line-up with a range of online and mobile content and services.

Panelists will answer such questions as: How significant a development is cable's embrace of the RDK and how are you addressing this? How are you innovating--what new developments do you see happening in the pay-TV space over the coming months and years and how do you plan to respond to those developments? How are you building a developer community? In what ways do you feel that the UI/UX of pay-TV services needs to evolve--how will subscribers find the content that interests them? How significant a role will cloud-based approaches play in the future of the pay-TV platform? And what do you see as the principal threats to pay TV and how are you helping counter them? Panelists include:

• Sefy Ariely, EVP Americas, Viaccess-Orca
• Susan Crouse, Technical Product Owner, Alticast
• James Field, Ecosystem Manager, Service Provider Video Technology Group, Cisco
• Adrian Fowkes, CTO, S&T Americas
• Dan Patton, Director of Multiscreen Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent
• Jay Tannenbaum, VP of Marketing, Sling Media
• John Tinsman, CTO, OpenTV

We look forward to seeing you there!

http://www.thetvoftomorrowshow.com/schedule-sessions

Visit Alticast at The Cable Show

Laser technique for faster Internet. It is simple!

Sometimes simple is all it takes. Many of us heard about phase cancellation during our physics classes. Think of two ocean waves that overlap to cancel each other out.  A new noise reduction technique for laser optics uses a similar approach sending two signals down the fiber path and subtracting them to remove common noise when they arrive at the receiver.

With growing consumer appetite for bandwidth rich video and other services, this technique could help with optical lines. Optical lines may one day reach all the way to your home.

The technologists applying the technique remark on the simplicity:

"At the receiver, if you superimpose the two waves, then all the distortions will magically cancel each other out, so you obtain the original signal back,” Liu told the BBC. “This concept, looking back, is quite easy to understand, but surprisingly, nobody did this before.” Venture Beat has more.

H.265 and EyeIO

With IP becoming the focus for next-generation cable STBs, how will we optimize bandwidth? The article below caught my attention about the technology of Eyeio (used by Netflix) vs. the advancement of H.265 (HEVC). The first hurdle in using H.265 is encoding existing libraries into this format so you can take advantage of the new footprint. The article contends that the technology form EyeIO already gives you both the quality of H.265 and the bandwidth savings, however there is no discussion of the business model. For H.265, there is the additional hurdle of codecs for decoding H.265 on target devices, however, if you see the plethora of announcements on the H.265 Wiki page, H.265 encoders and decoders are quickly beginning to proliferate.

Ironically the attached press release tells about the same story, but at the bottom of the press release in "About EyeiIO" they suggest breakthrough technology in both H.264 and H.265, which might suggest even greater bandwidth optimization in the future using H.265 and EyeIO technology together.

...and let's not forget about Google and it's desire to make VP8 the defacto (open source) video codec standard. There's a race going on to optimize bandwidth to serve the veracious appetite for video consumption. Many good algorithms are rising to the challenge, it will be interesting to see what rises to the top.

http://www.nscreenmedia.com/1/post/2013/01/why-wait-for-h265-when-you-can-have-the-benefits-now-thx-certified.html

For more technical insight into the development of H.265 see:
http://www.h265.net/

Why I hate the phrase "over-the-top" (OTT)?

I shiver when I hear folks use the phrase over-the-top. Why you ask?

Simply because the definition hinges on content not coming from the cable operator. In effect, it refers to a business model however, it is often used to refer to a service and underlying technology for delivering a video experience to devices over IP.

In the future, all video will be delivered over IP whether it is coming from a cable operator or third party. At some point it is indistinguishable to the user.

Maybe the operators need a new phrase over-the-toping-ourselves (Otto). But what about the case where the cable operator is going over a telco network to deliver video - Over-the-toping-of-the-other-guy (ottotog) :)