(Philadelphia, PA) Cable CEOs and CTOs alike agree that the pace of technological progress is the biggest challenge facing the cable industry now and for the foreseeable future. Speaking at two consecutive general sessions at the Society of Cable Engineer's Cable-Tec Expo here, industry business and tech leaders underscored how rapidly cable has transformed from a one-way video platform to a full-fledged interactive communications powerhouse.
Comcast President Steve Burke said "our company has changed so dramatically it would have been impossible to predict ten years ago. If you look out over the next five years, I would venture to say there will be more change than there has been in the last ten years."
Charter Communications CEO Neil Smit said that he worries about "how we will deliver at an accelerated rate all the services that a customer demands and how the network will deliver those services."
Although both a challenge and an opportunity for cable operators, technological progress has mostly been a good thing for traditional cable content providers. In terms of the broadband-enabled Internet, "there’s a lot of opportunity for us in that market to grow," Showtime CEO Matt Blank said. By releasing content online, Showtime, which made an early decision to sell content via iTunes, has fostered "a market situation where people are calling and asking for Showtime," Blank said.
HBO, on the other hand, won't stray quite as far out on the Internet lest it risk alienating its core cable operator customers. "We think it is better business for us to roll out our line businesses with our broadband distributors," HBO CTO Bob Zitter said, referring to its HBO on Broadband product, made available only to regular cable subscribers.
As the cable industry changes, the industry's technologists must become more adept in a lot of different engineering disciplines. Cable engineers have to move beyond their historical concentration on RF technology and become experts at IP and networking technologies, Charter Communications CTO Marwan Fawaz said. "We can't stay in silos easily anymore. The winner is the one who master all three [RF, IP and networking] and keeps looking ahead."
Making sure all the "silo'ed" services function well simultaneously is the industry's biggest problem, Cox CTO Chris Bowick said. "When I look at the possibility of bridging those silo'ed services....I think [it's] one of our biggest technological problems in the future."
Comcast CTO Tony Werner said that the rise of software-based services is necessitating a shift in the industry's talent base. "The rate at which we're transitioning from a hardware-based industry to a software-based industry" is astonishing.
Even old-fashioned TV broadcasters face the same kind of technical challenges. "We're shifting our infrastructure to one that is completely file-based," John McCoskey, CTO of PBS said.
One advantage that the U.S. cable industry has coping with the challenges of mounting a complex, next-generation architecture is its remarkable collegiality. "The cable industry has come together more times than not," Comcast's Burke said, citing recent efforts by multiple companies to join forces in WiMax and advertising efforts. "If the force pushing everybody together is strong enough it will overcome the individual company differences."
Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski said "cable companies do cooperate better than virtually any other industry I’ve seen."
This close-knit cooperation is not, however, characteristic of the European cable industry, where advanced technology standards have lagged due to competing interests, Roger Blakeway, Pres., SCTE Europe said. In Europe, there are "lots of good initiatives but when you have so many different companies working in so many different markets, it gets really difficult."
Cynthia Brumfield at 2:27 PM|Comments(0)
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