[opendtv] Re: News: The Internet revolution is about to be televised
- From: John McClenny <jamcclenny@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 07:32:42 -0600
On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 18:32:15 -0500, Manfredi, Albert E
<albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> John Shutt wrote:
>
> > Interesting concept, making every subscriber's IPTV
> > set-top-box in reality a member of a peer-to-peer
> > network. The "edge servers" are the combined cluster
> > of neighborhood STBs!
>
> Perhaps, but as Silvio mentioned, this is not the same
> model as cable. For example, how will this model help
> to deliver the Superbowl in real time to the entire
> country?
I did some design work on a Peer-To-Peer, HD in every STB distribution
model for a dead startup. It is really only useful for preplaced
content, such as newly released VOD titles. It basically was worse
solution from a network perspective than just preplacing content with
IP mulitcast.
Even active IPTV networks have the interconnection point between
adjacent households fairly far up the network. This didn't used to be
true. but the security disaster that is the internet has forced the
IPTV network to extreme measure to help protect you from your virus,
trojan riddled neighbor. Security is the overriding network design
issue now - for years ago, we designed a much more open network, while
in my current project, the network is a fortress. It must be to
survive.
So we end up with a VPN to each house, no real interconnect between
neighbors until we get fairly high up the distribution tree in the
network. This negates the localization effect of a neighborhood PTP
network and the advantage of that approach.
Longer term, the amount of VOD content is just too large a catalog to
have more than a fraction locally placed. Comcast has announced that
they want 10,000 hours of VOD content available by the end of the
year. That's a lot of disk space in MPEG-2 land, less in MPEG-4 land.
Eventually, we are going to get to network DVR solutions to get the
expensive HD out of the STB and move it into the network where we can
both store more content and share the resource. This is basically the
same model as a PTP STB network, just moving the storage a little
closer to the center.
A weird cost problem is driving the HD out of the STB - as IPTV STB
prices fall, the incremental cost for adding a HD increases. Just for
example, say that a very basic IPTV STB cost $100 (they still cost
more in real life), while adding a HD adds $80 to the BOM. In the old
days of 2002, that would have been an $80 addition to a $220 base
price. The floor price of HDs doesn't drop, but the capacity
increases with each generation. The incremental cost isn't just the
HD, but increased Power Supply, connectors, larger case, colling, etc.
The content people are the bottleneck in this right now, so the home
based HD will be the solution in the near term. That will eventually
change as they realize that their content is less likely ot get stolen
if it is not sitting on a HD in the STB where it can be probed and
prodded forever.
As MSO cable plants move to a more switched video model, it becomes
harder and harder to tell an IPTV network from a cable plant. The
problems are the same and the solutions just are different. If the
cable guys ditch the analog tier they even have more bandwidth, at the
cost of an increase in complexity versus an IPTV network. But it is a
complexity that they are comfortable with.
Doc
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