Video 2.0

Transcript

Introduction

Welcome today to the next installment in the Cisco Technology Audio Series. I'm Evan Schuman.

Consumers today are in an absolute love affair with video, perhaps more so than at any point since the popularization of television back in the 1950s. Then, like now, consumers were mesmerized by the newness of it. Today, that newness is coming in two ways. First, video is now available in far more devices, primarily smart phones, laptops, and PCs, as well as the changing of the video itself with high-definition content soaring in popularity.

With us today to try and sort all this out is Dave Brown, the Cable Solutions Manager at Cisco. Dave, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Interview

Dave Brown: It's a pleasure to be here, Evan.

Evan Schuman: Let's focus in on the living room television set perspective of video. What is involved in moving video delivery beyond the traditional set-top box?

Dave Brown: There is a number of technological advances that make it possible for service providers to deliver content to multiple devices and beyond the traditional set-top box. The probably first and foremost of the new technologies is simply the Internet itself. Broadband connections are getting faster and more plentiful. Most of the people in the United States, for example, have already migrated from dial-up connections to high-speed connections, and that's making possible very high-quality video through those Internet connections. As a result, operators of all stripes can take advantage of those connections in combination with the new and more powerful consumer devices to get an experience on any IP-connected device and not just the set-top box.

Evan Schuman: Is the evident move to high-definition, or more specifically, the requirement that television monitors support high-definition, is that going to have any impact?

Dave Brown: There's no question that the expectations of consumers in terms of video quality is getting higher and higher. Now, that said, a high-definition video stream takes about 12 megabits per second if you're using MPEG-2 or about half that, around 6 megabits per second using H.264. The Internet connections that are being made available, particularly with new technologies like DOCSIS 3.0, are moving well north of that, and many cable operators and other service providers are starting off at 100 megabits per second and more over their broadband connections, which is plenty for delivering either a standard definition or a high-definition video.

Evan Schuman: In that case, what do you see as the key challenges today in dealing with multi-platform video delivery?

Dave Brown: The challenges are significant. There's no question about it. The way we characterize the changes that are occurring, we call it Video 2.0. It builds upon the Web 2.0 transition that we see happening in the Internet. Where the various content sources are becoming more and more interactive, there's the ability for users to generate their own content, and there's the ability to form these social networks and actually communicate with one another about the content and about the experience that they're having.

The same thing is happening with video, and the consumers are expecting the same sort of capability to be delivered as part of their video service. We're moving from an era where you've got a very small number of content providers, you know, starting with the broadcasters, the NBCs, the ABCs, moving through the cable networks like CNN. It's all a relatively small number of content sources in the order of a couple of hundred typically in the system.

With Video 2.0, we're talking about a nearly unlimited number of sources, literally millions. If you look at YouTube alone, YouTube streams in the order of 6 billion different videos each month. As all of these subscribers and consumers generate this content, it really makes a big difference in how it's delivered through the system. You cannot deliver millions and millions of content sources the same way that you deliver a very small number of sources. Likewise, there's a shift from one-size-fits-all programming, where everything is broadcasted, done on a scheduled basis, and you actually have to schedule yourself around watching your favorite television shows.

Now, things are getting more and more personalized and one to one. You're able to watch things when you want on whatever device you want, wherever you happen to be, and that also makes a big difference to the way a network is engineered.

And, lastly, there's this transition from single device to set-top box, which is relatively straightforward to deliver to because televisions share the same resolution characteristics. They also use MPEG-2 as the standard delivery mechanism for television services. As you move to multiple devices, now you have to send different videos to match the screen size of the device. You have to support whatever the codec or the video delivery format that those device happen to understand, things like H.264, Adobe Flash, Windows Media, these types of video formats that are popular on the Internet. Those also have to be delivered as part of the overall system, so it definitely grows more sophisticated.

Evan Schuman: There seem to be two challenges or two issues that are cropping up now over the next couple of years.

One is interactivity, where it's not just taking a file and sending it out there; it's taking the material back and forth.

And, also, you have got much larger videos. Right now, the typical YouTube video is a couple of minutes long, but there is a lot more downloading of entire full two-hour motion pictures in high resolution that is being tried by a variety of services, and as you get hundreds of millions of people doing that, that places another extreme load. So how do you see interactivity and the larger size of the videos directly impacting what providers are going to have to deal with over the next couple years?

Dave Brown: There's no question that providers need to scale their networks beyond anything they've had to do before. Sort of a first part of answering that question lies in a move to what we call IP next-generation networks.

In the past, what the various service providers typically did is they had separate parallel networks for delivery of the different types of services. They would have one network for their video delivery, another network for their data and their IP voice delivery, and they were kept completely separate, engineered separately, run by different teams.

With IP, it has become possible to put together a single converged network that can deliver all these different types of services, and the advantage of IP is, first of all, it's extremely scalable. I mean the Internet is based on IP. So the same scalability that was brought to the Internet is now being brought to service provider networks. It's also got the quality of service, the reliability, and the flexibility that operators need to deliver this new generation of very high-speed, high-definition video services.

The second part of the equation is in the on-demand system. We've got the content delivery system, or CDS, which we use to tremendously scale the ability of the network to deliver on-demand personalized services. The content delivery system is engineered to deliver these very high-speed, high-capacity videos as are any of the set-top box, but it's built as a unified system that can deliver content not only to the set-top box but also these other devices. It also has all of the different protocols that are required to deliver to Internet devices all built in. It can support MPEG-2 and H.264 and Adobe Flash, and the list goes on.

The other great thing about the CDS is it can be deployed in a hierarchical and distributed fashion and support the caching model so that the most popular content is pushed into caches that sit on the edge of the network and can deliver that content to users. And then in the rare occasions where there's a cache miss and there's some less popular content that is requested, then it goes back to a centralized source in real-time and delivers it in real-time.

All this makes it very flexible, very adoptable, and capable of delivering services in this new era where you have millions of sources and all being delivered in a one-to-one on-demand fashion.

Another thing that I'd like to bring up is the importance of having devices that are capable of playing out the various different video formats. Because of this Video 2.0 transition, we have built hybrid set-top boxes for the cable space, our 4550/8550 series. They're actually capable of playing both traditional MPEG-2 video, as well as this new generation of IP Video, including support for things like H.264.

The hybrid next-generation set-top boxes are a key part of this overall solution and work in conjunction with the content delivery system to truly provide cable operators with a flexible system that is capable of delivering not only today's services but this whole new generation of IP video services needed for Video 2.0.

If you would like to learn a little bit more about the three screens and all of the challenges of multi-platform video delivery, we actually have a Tech Breakfast that is coming up at the NCTA Show in New Orleans. That will be on Monday morning, and I would certainly invite you to come and attend that breakfast, grab something to eat, and you can learn a lot more about the challenges and solutions for Video 2.0.

Evan Schuman: Excellent. That sounds like it could be a very, very nourishing breakfast, getting a lot more information beyond just the biscuits. I wanted to thank you very much, Dave, for spending your time with us today.

Dave Brown: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Evan Schuman: For the Cisco Podcast Series, this is Evan Schuman. For more podcasts on technology and other global news information, please go to newsroom.cisco.com. That's newsroom.cisco.com.