Sponsored Content by Matrix

Many broadcasters focus their ad sales efforts on surpassing their perceived competition, such as the cross-town rival in a local broadcast market or a new cable channel that is aimed at a similar audience. In reality, this isn’t the case: for most media companies, the largest source of competition for advertising dollars is from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other social media and Internet properties. Consider a few statistics:

- New York-based market research firm eMarketer reported that TV ad spending in the USA totaled $71 billion in 2019. 

- Also according to eMarketer, digital ad spending in 2020 totaled $139.8 billion for the U.S., which includes many different forms of advertising, such as banner ads, video ads and social media ads.  The top three recipients of these ad dollars were Google, taking in $40 billion, Facebook, capturing $35 billon, and Amazon which garnered $14 billion.   

- The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported on a survey conducted by Advertiser Perceptions to assess the intentions of larger advertisers and brands for spending in 2021. The survey found that 56% of video budgets are allocated to digital in 2021 as compared to 41% for traditional TV, including broadcast, cable and satellite. The survey also reported that digital video (which includes connected TV) is expected to enjoy double digit growth across all channels in 2021.

Broadcasters have good reasons to believe their inventory is more valuable than their digital competition. Television ads continue to have unassailable audience reach, particularly to populations that are not as active online, and they can be scheduled to reach consumers at home during leisure hours, when they have fewer other distractions. In contrast, most Internet usage happens at work during business hours. Broadcasters can also ensure that advertisers’ messages are not juxtaposed with unsafe or undesirable content. Plus, many studies have shown that ads on TV are more trusted by viewers than on other platforms.

Broadcasters do have barriers that make purchasing ads more difficult for buyers. Numerous local, as well as some national media companies, have inefficient internal ad sales processes, due to legacy systems and processes which compare unfavorably to the simple, quick sales transactions offered by online platforms. National marketers trying to place ads for a major TV campaign are confronted with markets that have multiple station groups and independent locals, many of which rely on disjointed sales and reporting systems. These difficulties are many times compounded by inconsistent metrics and reporting tools, making it difficult for advertisers to aggregate and analyze viewership data.

The sore point of lacking common metrics for reporting ad reach/effectiveness across media properties is detrimental for advertisers seeking a simplified ad buy. Although certain types of metrics are only available through interactive channels (such as click-through rates), broadcasters are unable to provide the data that they do have in a format that can be easily compared across multiple stations and markets. Although this improvement might, on the face of it, appear to increase competition between broadcasters, the reality is that traditional media companies are facing a much more significant threat from digital video advertising outlets on multiple facets. By teaming up and providing useful, granular data, broadcasters can help level the playing field against the digital ad giants in not only the ad sales process but in the post-sale attribution process helping to alleviate churn.

Broadcasters as a collective group can help expand the market for television advertisements by teaming up to define common currencies, ad sales platforms, and automated interfaces. By simplifying the ad sales process, broadcasters can reduce transaction costs without dipping into their revenue streams. Shared platforms would be particularly useful for advertisers with large budgets and a national footprint, but will also benefit smaller broadcasters and advertisers by making the TV ad sales process as easy as purchasing digital ads. 

TV advertising continues to represent a unique and powerful way for marketers to reach large and diverse audiences. Unfortunately, current methods and systems used to buy and sell TV advertising tend to suffer from high levels of inefficiency, fragmentation and legacy solutions, putting media companies at a disadvantage relative to digital ad providers. These core and common issues have the potential to be rectified, though, if broadcasters can work together to identify the issues and simplify and streamline the ad sales process, making them even more attractive to today’s marketers.

Explore how you can begin to combat many of these issues by centralizing and leveraging all of your 1st and 3rd party ad sales data to optimize inventory. Read more.

About Matrix

Matrix Solutions is a forward-thinking technology company that empowers the media ad sales world with intelligence, technology, and expertise. It provides the technology back bone for the end-to-end workflow for sales organizations, transacting in the media marketplace. Its flagship solution, Monarch, is the only global ad sales platform built specifically for media, delivering the CRM and business intelligence necessary to optimize inventory, while the Matrix Sales Gateway, serving as a sell-side dedicated platform allows for the ingestion and dissemination of data from all providers in the ecosystem that participate in the negotiation and execution process. Matrix manages more than $13 billion annually in media ad revenue, has over 10K users, maintains over 95% renewal rate, and has founded the annual Media Ad Sales Summit and Media Ad Sales Council (MASC) – both of which bring together industry leaders to advance the future of media ad sales. For more information, please visit matrixformedia.com.

Are the cables your company use part of the licensed and comprehensive HDMI technology eco-system of compliance and assurance?  Sometimes it can be hard to tell as the licensing requirements may not be known to end-users and resellers’ marketing can be confusing. As 4K content distribution becomes widely available and products with the newest HDMI 2.1 specification’s ultra high speed bandwidth-dependent features are in-market, it’s critical that cables and devices work together seamlessly and trouble-free.

The Premium HDMI® Cable Certification Program was launched in 2015 for Premium High Speed HDMI Cables and adds testing and certification to ensure support for 4K@60Hz, 18Gbps bandwidth and HDR. All lengths of cables must be tested at HDMI ATCs and pass EMI testing. With more 4K content being distributed, this cable is vital to both the consumer and commercial sectors especially cable, satellite and IPTV set-top box. It is widely specified globally for use by service providers for in-home installations. It also requires packaging to display the Premium HDMI Cable Certification Label for added verification of compliance and to prevent counterfeiting.

The new Ultra High Speed HDMI® Cable Certification Program supports the new Ultra High Speed HDMI Cables from the HDMI 2.1 specification. It’s the only cable that complies with stringent specifications designed to ensure support for all HDMI 2.1 features including uncompressed 8k@60, 4K@120 and the increased bandwidth of 48Gbps. This mandatory program ensures quality cables reach the market and support 4K and 8K video, HDR, VRR, eARC, and all other HDMI 2.1 features. All certified cable lengths must pass certification testing at an HDMI Forum ATC and be tested to meet current EMI requirements to minimize wireless interference. Cables are required to affix an Ultra High Speed HDMI Certification Label to each package.

Both certification programs utilize the proprietary HDMI LA cable certification scanning app available to end-users to verify certification and check the reseller brand and cable length. Also, both programs include HDMI LA audits of marketplace cables to ensure that production cables continue to pass certification testing during their product lifetime. 

What is the Licensed HDMI Technology Eco-System of Compliance? 

It starts with manufacturers who must be licensed HDMI Adopters in order to access the HDMI specifications and use the HDMI trademarks and logos. And where do the specs originate? The HDMI Founders produced the 1.4b Specification and Compliance Test Specifications; and since 2013 the HDMI Forum all subsequent versions including the latest Specification Version 2.1 and its Compliance Test Specifications. The HDMI Forum works in collaboration with authorized test equipment manufacturers whose equipment is used for testing, and HDMI Forum Authorized Test Centers (Forum ATCs) where the testing and certification takes place. This rock-solid system pertains to all HDMI product categories including cables.

HDMI Licensing Administrator, Inc. (HDMI LA) is the only organization that licenses the HDMI specifications. HDMI LA is the agent appointed by the HDMI Forum to license Version 2.1 of the HDMI Specification and is also the agent appointed by the HDMI Founders to license the 1.4b HDMI Specification. HDMI LA is tasked with enforcing compliance to the HDMI specifications and the HDMI adopted trademarks and logos. With misinformation spread about HDMI features, testing and certification, HDMI LA is the exclusive source for factual information. For more information go to HDMI.org

The terms HDMI, HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface, Premium HDMI Cable Certification Program, Ultra High Speed HDMI, Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable Certification Program, and the Premium HDMI Cable Certification Label, Ultra High Speed HDMI Certification Label, the Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable Logo and HDMI Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of HDMI Licensing Administrator, Inc.

In the evolving media landscape, full-time channel distribution over IP requires satellite-beating capabilities. When Gray Television and Ryman Hospitality Properties launched Circle, an American country music lifestyle network that multicasts from the Grand Ole Opry, they seized the opportunity to deploy a novel transport, monitoring, and control workflow. David Burke and Rick Young discuss the new requirements to consider for a network launch, meeting your channel objectives in the face of any challenge, and how broadcasters and service providers can collaborate to win the future of video.

SPEAKERS:

Wes Simpson, Moderator and Contributing Editor

Wes Simpson has always been interested in delivering media signals over networks. After starting his career in mobile telephony and then moving into fiber optics, he has focused on high performance video transport for the past 25 years. Wes has developed and delivered well-received training seminars covering IP video and media networking technology for a wide range of private clients and organizations such as the VSF, the IEEE BTS, and SMPTE. He is a contributing editor for TV Technology and frequently speaks at events including VidTrans, SMPTE, NAB, and IBC. He has written two books which have both been released as second editions: “IPTV and Internet Video” and Video Over IP.”

Rick Young, SVP & Head of Global Products, LTN Global

A media technology and services executive, Rick Young directs global product strategy for the LTN Ecosystem. Rick has held senior leadership roles at news organizations, content owners, and technology providers ranging from startups to global brands. Throughout his career, Rick has focused on the intersection of media and technology, from content creation and delivery to consumer experience perspectives.

David Burke, SVP, CTO, Gray TV

Mr. David Burke was appointed SVP, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), for Gray TV on January 1, 2019. Prior to that position, David served as the VP, CTO, for Raycom Media since January 2015. Mr. Burke held various IT and technology related positions since his employment began with Raycom Media in September 1997. Prior to Raycom Media, Mr. Burke served as an officer in the United States Air Force and then held various technology related positions in private industry. Mr. Burke has been involved in several Industry and professional associations over his career. Mr. Burke graduated from The Citadel in 1983 with a degree in Mathematics and earned an M.B.A. from the University of West Florida in 1986.

To register and view this webcast, click here. 

Your audience checks the weather every single day. Providing insights into how it will impact their daily lives can differentiate you from the competition. 

With thousands of options available for download or even pre-installed on devices, weather apps have become a commodity. That means unseating a user’s existing weather app requires more than looking different. You must provide unique and irresistible value. 

Discover how Weather InSight powered by AI can help you:

• Interpret and present the weather based on the greatest immediate impact to the user.
• Deliver a focused, customized experience based on user location, interests and preferences.
• Incorporate your trusted talent to add local context.
• Monetize content through programmatic revenue sharing. 

Learn more about how Weather InSight can help your mobile app rise above the competition.

Fill out the form to view our solution sheet today! 

While virtual MVPDs (multichannel video programming distributors) and over-the-top competitors are each trying to outdo the other with increased service flexibility and lower prices, top-notch customer care is becoming the differentiator for traditional pay TV service providers today.

Cable operators, who have spent the past several years focusing on the nuts and bolts of customer care -- narrowing appointment windows, improving on-time service and increasing network capacity and reliability -- are now taking a more macro approach, concentrating on bettering the overall customer experience and ensuring that the customer journey is an enjoyable one.

Join B&C /Multichannel News Senior Editor Michael Farrell, along with two of the cable industry's top customer care professionals, and learn tips about the following:

•  Customer experience and customer journey mapping
• How terms like "trust," "effort," "reliability," "likability" and "forgiveness" are becoming essential pieces in the overall approach to customer service
• What role customer service and improving customer experience has in rebranding efforts

Have a scheduling Conflict? We have you covered! Register for the live event and we’ll send you the on-demand recording shortly after the broadcast date.

Speakers

Dr. Patti has deep international experience through consulting and academic appointments throughout Europe, Australia, and Southeast Asia, with extensive experience in building, delivering, and evaluating curriculum in a wide range of settings, including doctoral seminars, MBA and other specialized postgraduate courses, undergraduate programs, and professional and corporate learning. He has special expertise in case method learning and has coordinated several case learning workshops, including a Harvard Business School case workshop. Dr. Patti holds a A.B. (history and literature), an M.S. (advertising) and a Ph.D., all from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

Courtney has been an integral member of the Atlantic Broadband Customer Care organization for the past 12 years. In her role, Courtney and her team work to ensure the company is delivering an outstanding customer care experience. She oversees residential and business call center operations including phone, chat and dispatch across all four operating regions. Courtney holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently pursuing an MBA from St. Francis University. She is also a member of the Young Professionals of the Alleghenies.

Click here to watch! 

$100 billion: That's about how much U.S. consumers paid last year to subscribe to pay-TV. Despite all the buzz about cord-cutting, nearly three-quarters of U.S. homes still subscribe to pay-TV services, and watch an average of 7 billion hours of paid content each week.

The downside for pay-TV operators is that Subscription VOD (SVOD) services like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are taking an increasingly larger share of these revenues. To address this, operators need to consider their pay-TV distribution options carefully and make the best strategic choices for the future.

The new TiVo white paper, The Value of Video: Pay-TV's Value in the Bundle and How to Boost Its Contribution examines the issues confronting pay-TV operators as they consider the future of their video platforms, and offers a range of investment scenarios that can make a difference.

The white paper starts by outlining the Four Pay-TV Market Truths affecting pay-TV today:

• At $100 billion in U.S. revenues annually, pay-TV remains an important money-maker for operators.
• Traditional pay-TV platforms are resistant to change and expensive to replace.
• Operators need to move to some form of next-gen pay-TV distribution platforms to compete with SVODs.
• Virtual MVPDs (vMVPDs) such as Sling TV prove that a cloud-based IPTV platform can provide a key advantage point for operators.

Having defined the threats, The Value of Video details the Strategic Signposts that accurately assess pay-TV's actual contribution to an operators bottom line. These signposts include:

• The economic contribution of each pay-TV customer to the operator over time, from sign-up through subscription and cancellation (aka customer lifetime value).
• The cost of provisioning pay-TV content and the operators gross margins from pay-TV operations (content costs/gross margin).
• Understanding how customers are actually using the operators pay-TV services by monitoring their usage data over time (customer usage metrics).
• How the operators video platform is (or isn't) capable of evolving to keep up with demand and competition over time (platform evolution).

With this information at hand, an operator can now evaluate the investment scenarios available to them for running competitive and profitable pay-TV distribution. To aid their evaluations, The Value of Video white paper provides detailed Strategic Signpost assessments for the following three scenarios

In brief, the first pay-TV investment scenario is built on a vMPVD Bundle, where a pay-TV operator partners with a vMVPD to deliver pay-TV to a set-top streaming media player like Roku or Fire TV.

This approach has a mixed impact on the four strategic signposts. Customer lifespan value is enhanced because the vMVPD helps reinforce the value of the bundle. However, there is a massive loss of video revenue, and the pay-TV operator is vulnerable to vMVPD price increases and problems. Gross margin is improved because substantial costs like content licensing fees and capital costs are reduced or eliminated. The loss of customer usage metrics means the pay-TV operator will be less effective at targeting pay-per-view promotions. Finally, the pay-TV operator will have a lighter video platform allowing them to leverage off-the-shelf and BYOD options.

The second investment scenario sees operators update/replace their current pay-TV infrastructure to compete with SVOD. This scenario boosts customer lifetime value and customer usage metrics, while increasing content costs, eroding gross margins, and impeding platform evolution due to adopting a non-IPTV hardware-based delivery solution.

The final scenario involves an operator moving to a cloud-based IPTV option, with DVR functions, on-demand service, and the user interface all being served to customers from the cloud. This is the only option that has a positive impact on customer lifetime value, customer usage metrics and platform evolution, while holding steady on content costs/gross margin over time and having no negative effects overall.

Having assessed the three investments without promoting any specific products or services, The Value of Pay-TV advises readers to decide for yourself which scenario helps you the most in raising the value of video products for your organization.

The TiVo white paper can be downloaded free of charge here.

It has been speculated for several years that 5G would represent an opportunity for the cable business, too, providing backhaul either for wireless companies or themselves.

Returning from Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans last week, Gregory Williams, analyst for equity research company Cowen, said in a note to investors this morning that the opportunity is “moving from concept to reality.”

“Cable is the only one that could deploy at scale at a reasonable cost, and expeditiously,” Williams wrote. “Specifically, cable has the plant assets and unique footprint (reach) for small cell backhaul, mid-haul or fronthaul.”

Related: Expo News: Charter to Team with Plume for Managed WiFi

As the analyst noted, the cable industry, led by CableLabs, is currently working on “low-latency X-haul,” “a technology specifically designed to reduce the latency experienced by any mobile traffic while traversing the DOCSIS transport network on its way to the internet,” as CableLabs describes it.

Meanwhile, ahead of the conference, the NCTA published a white paper noting that, not only does hybrid fiber coax (HFC) have a much larger footprint than fiber (around 3.5x more), fiber lacks the power supply needed to make backhaul happen.

“Developing the backhaul and powering infrastructure will be a daunting task for any potential [fixed wireless access] operator [except cable]," the NCTA said.

Related: House Looks to Lock Up 5G Security

Cable operators, meanwhile, can deploy small cells throughout their networks and leverage the aerial amplifier nodes as the “ideal co-location opportunity with plenty of power in nearly all housing density scenarios.”

Also notable: As Williams pointed out, cable operators who are pushing fiber deep are freeing up network equipment, and thus, making more power available for small cells. 

With over 300 streaming services to choose from, and more being added every day, consumers are confused and frustrated by OTT channels. In fact, 24% of consumers say that they already have too many TV subscriptions to manage. One in three won’t add a new OTT platform without cancelling an existing one first!

For content providers, this growing resistance to new OTT services is a serious problem. But it is one that can be addressed using an informed, methodical approach to streaming service launches and focusing on customer retention. In fact, many of the most successful OTT operators are using this approach to boost revenues and subscription levels – even as new OTT offerings from competitors clog the marketplace.

Read the white paper for the four key aspects of streaming service success.

This white paper is sponsored by Fluent.

The emergence and steady rise of OTT has forever changed the advertising landscape. TV, OTT, and digital video were once clearly defined as separate entities, but the lines between them are blurred, thanks to the wide variety of streaming services and devices now in play.

This doesn’t have to stop your advertising from meeting – and exceeding – benchmarks. Audiences are still watching TV and video in droves. No matter how they’re watching, the right advertising strategy backed by in-depth audience data will ensure you are reaching them.

Learn the top facts to know about the convergence of TV and digital and how to meet the evolving media landscape head on in our comprehensive guide.

We’ll cover:

• The first factor disrupting the media buying landscape is the shift to impression-based buying across all media, rather than relying on TV ratings. By changing the standard currency to impressions we can use any source of measurement, including Nielsen, set-top-box data, comScore, and more.

• The second factor is the truth about cord-cutting. Many are cord stacking, which occurs when a cable TV subscriber adds Netflix and other paid OTT services to their lineup.

• The third factor is the evolution of multiscreen viewing. Video viewing has not dropped due to the web; it’s just become spread across more platforms and screens.

• The fourth factor is the power of first-party and third-party data. In an increasingly multi-platform world, audience/consumer data is key to making the most targeted media purchases.

• The final factor? Goal-orientated campaign intelligence. Integrated, cohesive campaign measurement driven by impressions-based buying. With the emergence of this precise “campaign intelligence,” advertisers can now reliably assess how well their multi-platform ad campaigns are performing – and why.

Collectively, the Five Factors are good news for advertisers, ad sellers, and the viewers who receive commercials targeted to their needs and interests. This is a quantum leap from the old ways of video advertising.

Additional Resources

“The Convergence of TV, OTT & Digital video: 5 Factors Disrupting the Media Buying Landscape” explains how OTT and digital video have forever changed the advertising landscape.

As he once again looks to disrupt the telecom business, this time with a fixed wireless play, former Aereo chief executive Chet Kanojia has a new CFO.

His new Boston-based technology company, Starry, has just poached Gregg Bien from Assurant Wireless. Bien, who has also worked for AT&T and Disney, will lead the financial future of a startup which has raised more than $250 million to date.

“Starry is in a period of explosive growth,” Kanojia said, in a statement. “We have more than doubled our headcount in the last year and have expanded our network footprint coverage to pass more than 1.5 million households. Bringing Gregg in at this juncture will be critical to maintaining this pace of growth and maintaining the financial discipline that has enabled this success. Gregg is a proven financial leader who understands how to drive success in this industry. We’re thrilled to welcome him to Starry.”

Launching in beta back in 2016, Starry was the first company to commercially deploy pre-standard 5G, point-to-multipoint fixed wireless technology to deliver gigabit-capable broadband to the home.

In addition to Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, New York City and Denver, Starry will also expand its service to 17 additional markets over the next year including: Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Miami, Memphis, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Manchester, NH, Portland, OR, and Sioux Falls, SD.

Today’s streaming video subscribers want things to be simple. They want to be able to log into every service they pay for using a single password – and nothing else.

It doesn’t matter to subscribers if they’re watching a linear channel like ESPN or OTT content from Netflix on their TV, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Neither do these subscribers care whether they’re buying these services from their MVPD provider (through-MVPD) or directly from a content provider like CBS All Access (direct-to-consumer).

All subscribers want is to watch whatever they want to watch when they want to watch it using a single log-in password that can access it all fast.

Giving subs what they want

It is possible for MVPDs and content providers to deliver this level of convenience by powering log-in systems using a single identity management system like Synacor’s Cloud ID platform.

“This one secure, scalable platform handles all aspects of subscriber log-ins for MVPDs and content providers alike,” said John Kavanagh, Synacor’s VP of Product Management. “It also provides a single log-in point for subscribers, eliminating churn-driving frustrations that motivate consumers to cancel their MVPD subscriptions.”

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLBDZf44Y6I[/embed]

John Kavanagh – Synacor Cloud ID Authentication

Synacor’s John Kavanagh explains Cloud ID’s single log-in system in just 1:18.

Why a single identity management system makes sense for MVPDs

Today, many MVPDs are still using a suite of legacy identity stacks to manage subscriber log-ins in association with their personal and financial information.

One stack allows subscribers to log into the MVPD’s online video services. The second handles email access; the third, web access; the fourth, access to the subscriber’s account and billing information and so on.

Using so many stacks requires multiple inputs by MVPDs creating opportunities for input operators to make mistakes and giving hackers many sites to attack and breach.

These stacks also don’t talk to each other, which means that whenever an MVPD launches a new service, a new stack has to be provisioned and maintained in the MVPD’s data center.

A cloud-based identity management system like Cloud ID integrates all of this data into a single, secure online location. This provides MVPDs with a single database that contains all services being used by subscribers as well as holding their account information.

“Adding a new service to an account is quick and easy, because all of the relevant subscriber data is already on file,” said Kavanagh. “And because the platform is in the cloud, it is easy for MVPDs to expand their database as they see fit – without having to add and provision new servers in their data centers.”

As for subscribers? They’re happy and loyal because a feature like Cloud ID’s Forever Login™ allows them to log-in once and access all of their content subscriptions indefinitely.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlQ7niklXZQ[/embed]

Synacor Cloud ID CTAM Presentation June 7, 2017

A graphics-only video outlining Cloud ID’s features shown at CTAM (Cable & Telecom Association for Marketing) 2017 convention

Cloud ID gives content providers full control

In addition to selling through MVPDs, many content providers are now selling OTT video straight to customers (direct-to-consumer). This approach allows them to earn revenues from cord-cutters (people who have dropped or never subscribed to cable/satellite TV), while not paying fees to MVPDs for these viewers.

Unfortunately, many content providers are using a competitor’s identity management system that only supports the direct-to-consumer model. This limited approach surrenders control of through-MVPD viewers to MVPDs and their sale priorities, rather than the profit-making goals of content producers.

Because Cloud ID supports the direct-to-consumer and through-MVPD distribution models, content providers who use it have control over both types of customers.

“This is the case for HBO,” said Kanavagh. “They are using Cloud ID to support identity management for HBO NOW (a direct-to-consumer platform) and HBO GO (a through-MVPD platform). With Cloud ID, HBO calls the shots in both markets.”

Happy subscribers mean continuing revenues

Cloud ID makes subscribers happy by providing them with a single log-in to all of their paid content.

“When subscribers are happy, they stick with their MVPDs and content providers,” Kavanagh concluded. “At most, they may buy new services. But they don’t stop paying money to their MVPDs and content providers, and that’s what matters most.”

Additional Resources

Unifying Subscriber Identity Systems Offers Business Opportunities, Efficiencies to MVPDs

Aimed at MVPDs, this Synacor white paper explains the many advantages of consolidating legacy identity stacks in a single identity management system.

Empowering Direct-to-Consumer Sales for Content Providers 

This Synacor white paper guides content providers through the challenges and opportunities of selling their products directly to viewers online.

Synacor’s Cloud ID

This is the product page for Synacor’s Cloud ID identity management system.

Why This Matters: After stops and starts, artificial intelligence technologies now stand poised for a major business breakthrough.

As emerging technologies go, artificial intelligence (AI) has certainly taken its time in making its presence felt on the world.

Surprising as that may be, the term AI has actually been around for almost 70 years, having been first coined back in 1955 by computer scientist John McCarthy, a.k.a. the ‘father of AI’, the same year Emmett Brown invented time travel in the movie Back to the Future.

Since then, AI has experienced a largely stop-start existence, principally due to sporadic funding and below-par technology. In truth, the term AI has (arguably) gained more notoriety for storylines of killer robots (and the occasional Wall-e) hell-bent on destroying mankind than for its practical use and business benefits. But that’s all changing.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Thanks to breakthroughs in computing power, the advent and availability of big data, cloud hosting/storage, highly sophisticated software, and complex algorithms, the potential of AI is now starting to be fulfilled—with the business world being the biggest benefactors.

The market has reacted at pace. In recent years, billions of dollars have been invested by many of—if not all—of the world’s leading organizations into AI technologies (and companies), each of them looking to utilize some form of AI technology to future proof and improve their businesses, and/or create a competitive advantage

Various estimates suggest more than $46 billion will be spent on AI services by 2020 by businesses, a figure rising to above $51 billion 12-months later.

Where AI Will Have the Greatest and Earliest Impact

• E-commerce
• Customer Service (including call centers)
• Healthcare (including lifestyle)
• Automotive
• Cybersecurity
• Finance
• Legal

But What Is AI?

Before we go on (for the non-computer scientists out there), it’s perhaps worth clarifying a few things around what AI is and is not. Yes, AI can mean robotics, but the best examples of AI are purely software based rather than having a physical form.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of often extremely technical and confusing definitions banded around online and in various publications detailing what AI actually provides. Indeed, entire books have been written detailing the subject.

For a more technical and detailed description we recommend you visit your local library, or download a copy of one from the many AI authors out there—Nick Bostrom’s “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” is a personal favorite of mine.

In its most simple form, AI is the study of methods for making computers behave intelligently and being able to replicate various characteristics of humans.

These can include identifying objects, sounds, understanding languages spoken, reading, and understanding content such as text and numbers.

Machine learning (ML) is another extremely important branch of AI that you'll often hear and read about. ML uses a more cognitive approach, using algorithms that enable it (whatever form factor ‘it’ may be) to combine what it’s been programmed to do, but also the capability of learning for itself through experience.

Where We Are

Depending on what you have seen, heard, or read (fictional or not), you may have different ideas as to what AI is and is not capable of at this stage. To offer some clarity there are three simple levels to be aware of:

1. Weak AI

AI capable of demonstrating human intelligence to carry out specific tasks.

2. Strong AI

AI capable of showing self-awareness, the ability to think and make decisions for itself to the same level as a human being.

3. AI Super Intelligence

AI showing superior levels of intelligence to human beings and fully in control of its existence.

For now—and for the foreseeable future—only Weak AI is currently relevant, so it’s time to remove any images of a leathered up, sunglasses wearing Arnold Schwarzenegger.

AI Terminologies You Need to Know

Algorithm is an unambiguous specification of how to solve a class of problems. Algorithms can perform calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning tasks.

Chatbot (also known as a talkbot, chatterbot, bot, IM bot, interactive agent, or artificial conversational entity) is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner.

Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning or hierarchical learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on learning data representations, as opposed to task-specific algorithms. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised, or unsupervised.

A virtual assistant is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual. Sometimes the term "chatbot" is used to refer to virtual assistants generally or specifically those accessed by online chat (or in some cases online chat programs that are for entertainment and not useful purposes).

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence in the field of computer science that often uses statistical techniques to give computers the ability to "learn" (i.e., progressively improve performance on a specific task) with data, without being explicitly programmed.

Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and science that includes mechanical engineering, electronics engineering, computer science, and others. Robotics deals with the design, construction, operation, and use of robots, as well as computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, and information processing.

Speech recognition is the interdisciplinary sub-field of computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enables the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech to text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the linguistics, computer science, and electrical engineering fields.

It’s Already Here

Examples of weak AI have widely been adopted by many different businesses and are in use today—you just might not realize it.

In fact, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’ve already unknowingly encountered some form of AI and machine learning technology before you started reading this article. Maybe even before you got out of bed.

Have you ever used Apple’s personal assistant, Siri? Or Google’s Alexa? Perhaps you’ve noticed how your emails can often now detect questions being asked of you and automatically provide you with a readymade short reply? How about your smart phone that seems to be able to predict sentences you’re about to type as you’re typing?

For those that like a bit of online shopping (such as Amazon) or video streaming (Netflix), have you ever wondered how those personalized recommendations are determined? What about Facebook and its ability to not only recognize there are people in the photo you’ve posted, but can sometimes even identify them, too?

They’re all using some form of AI, with the intention of bettering their customer’s experience, enhancing their financial opportunities and—unseen externally—improve their efficiency in workplace.

AI for All

“We are at the cusp of a new revolution, one that will ultimately transform every organization, every industry, and every public service across the world,” said Ralph Haupter, president, Microsoft Asia. “I believe 2018 is the year that this will start to become mainstream, to begin to impact many aspects of our lives in a truly ubiquitous and meaningful way.”

You may be forgiven for thinking the implementation of AI is something exclusively for the Fortune 500’s of this world...but you’d be wrong. Today, things are so advanced that there is unlimited growth potential with AI companies designed to support business like yours.

In essence, AI is something that can be packaged up and purchased on a monthly basis, like your broadband or phone. This model reduces significant costs associated with more bespoke in-house solutions.

It also means the complexity is significantly removed (the ‘it doesn’t matter how it works as long as it works’ approach), meaning you won’t necessarily need to go and employ a qualified and expensive computer scientist.

“You don't need to be a mathematics genius or have a PhD in software engineering to make sense of AI for your business,” said Gartner analyst Whit Andrews. “You don't have to make massive investments in infrastructure and personnel in order to start applying AI's potentially transformative technologies.

“These technologies will transform the nature of work and the workplace itself,” he added. “Machines will be able to carry out more of the tasks done by humans, complement the work that humans do, and even perform some tasks that go beyond what humans can do. As a result, some occupations will decline, others will grow, and many more will change.”

Competitive Advantage

So, why should you and your business consider implementing AI? Could it be just a fad? Will it really benefit you?

The answers are wide, extremely varied, and will be largely unique to your own business. There may be some obvious areas of your business you'd like to improve upon—be it financially or operationally motivated.

The magnitude and inevitability of AI cannot be ignored, nor underestimated. Many AI experts and professionals have described the potential impact of AI on businesses as being equivalent to the invention an adoption of the personal computer and email.

Some suggest that AI can help boost revenues by around 20 percent, while others warn that any business currently not at least thinking about adopting some form of AI could already be two years behind a rival. Further delays could even result in their demise further down the road due to losing a competitive advantage.

Do or Die

“More than one-third of businesses will not survive the next 10 years,” said John Chambers, the now former CEO of Cisco during a discussion on AI. “Companies should not miss the market transition or business model nor underestimate your competitor of the future—not your competitor of the past.”

Ovum principle analyst, Michael Azoff added: “Every business should at a minimum make itself aware of AI progress in its industry.”

Getting Started

The first thing to remember is what the purpose of AI actually is and identifying how it can benefit your business. From speaking to various professionals in the field, it can be narrowed down to two core reasons: solving existing problems and discovering/identifying new opportunities.

At its core, AI is fueled by data, which can come in many different forms for many different uses. Emails, newsletters, subscriptions, views to your website, downloads, and sales are just some examples of where data can be collected.

On its own, that data may not seem useful. However, contained within, it could be the difference between success and failure or profit and loss. This is where AI comes into play, and where it would be able to—in many instances—do the job of a human.

A famous quote within AI circles comes from Michael Palmer of the Association of National Advertisers sums it up well: “Data is just like crude [oil]. It’s valuable, but, if unrefined, it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc. to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; data must be broken down and analyzed for it to have value.”

Today, the bulk of that potentially valuable data held in companies is still not being utilized. “If we look at the amount of data which is actually being analyzed today, only 20 percent of the data we have is searchable and being used productively,” said IBM chairman, president, and CEO Ginni Rometty during a discussion on the subject. “The other 80 percent is held inside companies, generally not being used.”

Impact on Jobs

One of the more universal drivers for AI is centered around automation—a word often which spreads fear when discussing the risks to people’s professions. Areas like administrative work (such as data processing and data collection) are widely seen as function where AI will support—or even replace—humans.

AI and Careers

According to Oxford University, the following professions each have a 99-percent probability of being replaced by computers in the future.

• Data Entry Keyers
• Library Technicians
• New Accounts Clerks
• Photographic Process Workers and Processing Machine Operators
• Tax Preparers
• Cargo and Freight Agents
• Watch Repairers
• Insurance Underwriters
• Mathematical Technicians
• Sewers, Hand
• Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers
• Telemarketers

Meanwhile, the following professions are said to be widely safe from AI replacement.

• Recreational Therapists
• First-Line Supervisors of Mechanics, Installers, and Repairers
• Emergency Management Directors
• Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers
• Audiologists
• Occupational Therapists
• Orthotists and Prosthetists
• Healthcare Social Workers

Some figures suggest almost half of all activities at work could eventually be automated, while Price Waterhouse Cooper estimates AI powered machines could take up to 30 percent of UK jobs by 2030. The Bank of England has estimated that 15 million jobs may be at risk.

“If your work is repetitive and not creative, you will be gone very soon,” was a stark warning Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy, a professor in the department of computer engineering and computer science at the Speed School of Engineering, University of Louisville.

Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, was quoted as saying: “A lot of large companies have middle management jobs where people manage other people at a very low-level in terms of keeping track of things like vacations and sick days. Those jobs I believe are at risk. Jobs that involve a large routine component. If you’ve made the proper investment, you can develop an AI system that can take over a good fraction of those jobs. A lot of big companies have a lot of those positions and will be looking at it.”

Examples of automation and loss of jobs can be seen all over the world today. Some of the headline grabbing stories include that of a Japanese law firm, Fukoku Mutual Life, which invested more than $1.7 million building an AI platform with IBM Watson, has used the technology to replace more than 30 staff members. The annual savings for the firm is predicted to be around $1 million a year.

“The next wave of economic dislocation won’t come from overseas,” President Barack Obama said in 2017 during his farewell address. “It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes many good middle-class jobs obsolete.”

Spotting an Opportunity

Another major area for AI adoption is within sales. There are now examples of where AI, using natural language processing software and specific algorithms, is able to spot patterns (in data), to identify new opportunities and provide a level of analysis in just a few seconds.

This can vary greatly. Examples include gaining greater knowledge on customer’s viewing and buying behavior—i.e, what they’re looking at and when they most likely buy (such as pay day).

Another might be identifying the best time to send bespoke marketing and promotional materials or newsletters to specific customers rather than en masse as part of a one-size-fits-all strategy. Another could be automatically identifying cold customers that haven’t transacted with you for a while and send them updates, reminders, or special offers to help get things over the line.

The Future of AI

These are just a handful of examples of how and where AI is already proving significant benefits and opportunities for businesses all over the world.

It’s important to realize these are all current technologies, with this article designed to demonstrate and educate you as a businessperson, what is available today, rather the stargazing into the future.

The AI revolution is here and it will—if it doesn’t already—play a key role in the future of the way your business runs and performs. When you decide to get on board is up to you. I’ll leave you with this quote from Gartner: “As vendors exploit AI software capabilities within business suites, enterprise applications, infrastructure support services, and the customer experience, your organization will need new or updated strategies. Ready or not, AI is coming to you.”

Need to Know More? Have a burning question about artificial intelligence, or maybe a request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

As streaming platforms have turned to advanced computer science to help their customers more easily find movies and TV shows they’ll like, the 2001 sleeper hit Donnie Darko has provided an interesting example of a title that’s hard to put into a search bucket using traditional metadata tools.

Humans employed to classify Donnie Darko with metadata have traditionally just put the film in the horror-drama-fantasy bucket, explained Bel Lepe, chief technology officer for Ooyala, a video technology company specializing in advanced user content search and recommendation. But the movie about a high school student driven to violent crime by a man in a white rabbit suit is also rich in dark comedic overtones.

"Surfacing" a film like Donnie Darko on an advanced user interface requires the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, or applying AI to give systems the ability to learn and improve from their experiences without specifically programming them.

“AI provides a different view of content and a greater level of detail,” Lepe said. “Through sentiment analysis, AI can algorithmically go through the film second by second, frame by frame, and capture its true prevailing quality.”

Indeed, as user interfaces have advanced to help TV viewers more easily find content amid an ever expanding field of choices, the data science used to achieve true personalization in many cases has moved beyond the scope of human capabilities. The blending of voice recognition into the user search and recommendation process only serves to further the need for AI.

“The industry is moving to deep learning completely for metadata extraction, language translations, user intent mining and personalized discovery,” said Lijin Chungapalli, senior software engineer of metadata engineering group for TiVo.

“Manual operations are too expensive and do not scale,” he added. “Machine learning will soon achieve human level accuracy. Using machine learning, the industry will move towards scene-level metadata for cast, mood, tones and product placement by processing video samples. We will have deeper integration with merchandising with effective entity recognition of products in a scene. Content augmentation will be completely dominated by machine generated data and we will see the decline of human curation in the next five years.”

According to Lepe, the video industry is experiencing a democratization of AI tools, which once existed as proprietary technology for large companies such as Netflix and Comcast.

Through cloud resources including Microsoft’s Azure, metadata tools exist now that let video companies wishing to deploy advanced personalization features do their own training.

“You no longer need a team of 40 data scientists,” Lepe said.

While personalization features have become table stakes for video companies wishing to supply their subscribers with modern video interfaces, there’s a lot more work that needs to be done to make these systems truly intuitive and personalized, Chungapalli added.

“Even though much progress has been made in this space, we are still at very early stages of deeper semantic understanding of content,” he said. “There is a paradigm shift and the focus has switched to machine learning in this area. With huge datasets available and cheaper hardware, machine learning has been gaining ground over conventional search and discovery applications. The future lies in machine learning and it is maturing at a faster pace and finding diverse applications.”

Date: August 30, 2018

Time: 12:00pm ET

It’s been a decade since the video industry saw its first sVOD service. A lot has changed over the past 10 years. Technology challenges facing content and video providers (CAVPs) have given way to business concerns as the industry matures.

Key findings of a new research report from Broadcasting & Cable and TV Technology and Comcast Technology Solutions, underscore this shift. Fully 60% of CAVPs identify business issues as their top challenge right now. Join Editor-in-Chief Tom Butts, nScreen Media analyst Colin Dixon, and Matt Smith of Comcast Technology Solutions as they discuss the greatest concerns facing CAVPs and the strategies being deployed to tackle these challenges during this informative webinar.

Among the highlights:

• Controlling costs and maximizing customer lifetime value are important, but not the top business challenge concerning CAVPs.
• 3 key features CAVPs identified as differentiators to stay ahead of their competition.
• Why half of the responders would put most of their existing service in the cloud.

Register Here

Speakers and Moderators

Moderator: Tom Butts - Editor in Chief, TV Technology

Speaker: Colin Dixon - Chief Analyst & Founder, nScreenMedia

Speaker: Matt Smith - Executive Director, Comcast Technology Solutions

TV viewing in America is not what it used to be. Unless it’s a ‘must-watch’ event like the Super Bowl (over 103 million Americans watched the Eagles overtake the throne), today’s TV viewer is watching what they want, when they want, and on whatever device is available.

This flexibility has changed the way people look at TV. No longer a one-size-fits-all product, premium video content is a personal experience in the hands of the viewer.

In a multichannel, multiplatform viewing universe dominated by consumers, smart advertisers are playing to new strategies – and winning.

The Straightforward Guide to Targeting Today’s TV Viewer

This ADWEEK Branded/DISH Media Sales report explains why buying audiences rather than programs using addressable advertising delivers measurable results.

Instead of focusing on the shows they “think” viewers are watching, brands are buying audiences. Impression-based advertising is centered on specific audience attributes – people whose interests, demographics, and behaviors align with what they’re selling – meaning buyers transcend viewership barriers and serve relevant messages to consumers regardless of what they’re watching.

This form of advertising is known as ‘addressable advertising,’ and is the heart of successful digital targeting in the television ecosystem. By utilizing first and third-party data, addressable advertising allows the marketer to buy the eyeballs of the people most interested in these products/services, and who have the motivation and spending power to buy them.

Breaking the Linear TV Model

DISH Media Sales is a committed provider of addressable for brands as part of our integrated cross-platform advertising strategy across DISH set-top box and Sling TV over-the-top impressions.

The rationale behind addressable is to make the ad planning and buying processes easier for advertisers. Its heat-seeking technology removes the need for daypart and network scheduling – an ad will serve to the selected viewer when they are watching content. In the DISH satellite universe, we do this by storing addressable ads directly in the target viewers’ DVRs for playback during the first available commercial break when the set-top box is turned on. On Sling TV, we serve up addressable ads over IP via live dynamic ad insertion.

Addressable campaigns send specific ads to specific audiences during the show they are watching on the device they are using; thus, ensuring every time an ad is delivered, a valuable impression is served.

Proving that addressable advertising works

Perhaps the crux of addressable’s value is its ability to provide results on the backend. DISH Media Sales’ access to subscriber viewing behavior and third-party data partnerships allows us to connect the dots between impressions and purchases. Brands can see exactly how their ad performed with detailed post-campaign reporting.

Now, the performance of cross-platform ads on both DISH and Sling TV is measurable and quantifiable with a single metric. This is because comScore has partnered with DISH Media Sales to measure and report addressable advertising impressions across both satellite set-top boxes and OTT.

Think about it: We can now give addressable advertisers a fluid view of their ad campaigns’ performance across OTT on connected TVs, mobile devices, and computers; as well as TV impressions on DISH. Using this combined data, these advertisers can see which ads worked for them, and learn from viewers’ responses to those ads to fine-tune future campaigns for even better results and higher sales.

Obviously, we at DISH Media Sales would like advertisers to choose our addressable advertising services. But whether they do or not, all advertisers (at least those who want their ads to generate sales) need to learn about addressable advertising, and how the combined scale of TV and targeting of digital is upending traditional media buying as we know it.

Additional Resources

DISH Media Sales puts Volvo Cars Behind the Wheel of First Cross-Platform Addressable Ad Campaign

Volvo Cars conducted a nine-week addressable advertising campaign across DISH Network and Sling TV, to target and reach four segments of luxury car enthusiasts across both platforms.

DISH Media Sales Insights

Head to the DISH Media Sales website for additional addressable insights and findings.

Technology-related content delivery challenges are taking a back seat to business issues as the online video segment of the industry matures. New research conducted by Broadcasting & Cable and TV Technology magazines in partnership with Comcasttechnology Solutions, confirms this shift, and many others as content and video providers (CAVPs) shared their strategies for optimizing the business and technical performance of their video distribution services.

This report lays out these details including:

• Controlling costs and maximizing customer lifetime value are important, but not the top business challenge
• 3 key features CAVPs identified as differentiators to stay ahead of their competition
• Why half of the responders would put most of their existing service in the cloud
• How clip sharing can be a critical component to building subscriber numbers

Click here to download the full white paper.

As cybercrimes and incidents of institutional hacking increase, cybersecurity is a critical concern for big TV distributors that give consumers access to the internet.

It’s also a strange topic for cable operators, though, because it’s rarely discussed in public, beyond the chorus of concern from consumer data watchdogs.

The Federal Communications Commission, whose leaders have made lofty speeches about the importance of cybersecurity, offers a perfunctory summary of its cybersecurity objectives, with few details about its cable or telco initiatives, in describing the FCC Cybersecurity and Communications Reliability (CCR) Division.

Need to Know:Cybersecurity

NCTA–The Internet & Television Association and the American Cable Association emphasize that “the entire cable industry takes cybersecurity very seriously” and back security and risk management practices. But details about those efforts — or the failures in the system — are scant.

Still, the scale of cyber-threats to the cable industry is significant and growing. In Akamai’s Summer 2018 State of the Internet/Security: Web Attack report, the firm measured a 16% increase in the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks recorded since last year globally, with new and more devious attack methods noted.

There are also constant reminders of new threats. This past May, researchers found that U.S. customers’ WiFi connections could be harvested from a cable operator's bill or email. Comcast said it quickly disabled the vulnerability in its activation portal, established an additional layer of authentication and that no personal user info was ever accessed.

Steve Goeringer, principal security architect at CableLabs, said cable has been “at the forefront of cybersecurity of broadband” thanks to the DOCSIS cable-modem specification, which has employed strong encryption and authentication since its version 1.1. Subsequent updates have created further barriers to DoS and DDoS, he added.

“Delivering services the way they were intended, including protecting customer privacy, is always critical,” Goeringer said. He cited pirated over-the-top content, which aside from being illegal, also exposes consumers to malicious software and theft of personal information, and the growing presence of Internet of Things devices, which are often insufficiently protected and can bring malicious software into the system.

Kyrio, a CableLabs subsidiary that provides technology services, has been focusing on Internet of Things security. “Companies that can provide strong security at scale will be able to use that as a key differentiator for their products, protect their brand and future-proof their products,” Ron Ih, the company’s director of business development, said in a June 4 blog post. Putting an emphasis on cable’s growing involvement with wireless services, he observed that, “expanded wired and wireless connectivity accelerates the need for a more scalable security solution for these networked devices” in the IoT value chain.

CableLabs vice president of technology policy Rob Alderfer recently acknowledged the need for government/industry cooperation, especially in the fast-emerging IoT category.

“With the constant barrage of new cyber incidents, often driven by IoT devices vulnerable to exploitation, governments at all levels are taking notice and grappling with the rapidly evolving threat,” according to a CableLabs summary of his remarks at a IoT workshop. “Cybersecurity is no longer the domain of the IT department, but rather a key area of governance for all enterprises.”

Need to Know:Cybersecurity

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about cybersecurity — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

More from Future on cybersecurity:

• Cybersecurity and Television [TV Technology]
• Cybersecurity and Retail [TWICE]
• Cybersecurity and Radio [Radio World]
• Cybersecurity and ProAV [AV Network]
• Cybersecurity and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• Cybersecurity and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• Cybersecurity and Education [Tech & Learning]

“We keep building new things on old infrastructure that never seems to get fixed.”

Chris Wysopal is a hacker who was quoted in a column in The Washington Post about the state of internet security (or perhaps we should call it “insecurity”). In May, Wysopal — also known by his hacker name, Weld Pond — joined several others in a return visit to Capitol Hill, where 20 years prior they had testified in a congressional hearing about the insecurities of software and networks.

Their 1998 appearance helped put the issue of cybersecurity on the national stage. A central part of their 2018 message is that digital security isn’t much better today.

Need to Know:Cybersecurity and Cable

Costly and Dangerous

Malicious cyberactivity cost the U.S. economy between $57 billion and $109 billion in 2016, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Cyber threats are ever-evolving, and the sophistication of adversaries keeps growing. But the private sector may, for any number of reasons, be tempted to underinvest in cybersecurity, according to the White House report.

National security officials echo the concern.

“Our daily life, economic vitality, and national security depend on a stable, safe and resilient cyberspace,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in explaining why it devotes a large web resource to the topic.

The department this spring released a strategy hoping to help reduce vulnerabilities, build resilience, counter malicious actors, and make the ecosystem more secure. It identifies 16 “critical infrastructure” sectors where a loss of networks would have a debilitating effect on the country. But even trying to define those sectors demonstrates how broadly the subject touches every corner of American life; they range from commercial facilities and manufacturing to the communications sector and health care.

DHS took particular note of a growing concern about the threat of “wide-scale or high-consequence events” that could cause harm or disrupt services on which the economy and millions of people depend. “Sophisticated cyber-actors and nation-states exploit vulnerabilities to steal information and money and are developing capabilities to disrupt, destroy or threaten the delivery of essential services,” the report said.

How might your own business be whacked? A threat can come via denial-of-service attacks; destruction of data and property; disruption of business, perhaps for ransom; and the theft of your proprietary and financial and strategic information. Reports of data breaches and cyberattacks are everyday news. Lewis Morgan of the IT Governance Blog curated more than 60 such stories in the month of May and counted the total of breached records that month at more than 17 million — “actually quite low when compared with previous months.”

In 2018, virtually every major and minor business or organization relies on the global, interdependent IT ecosystem. The degree to which leaders take the subject seriously could, in the long term, determine the survival of those enterprises.

To learn which trends businesses should be watching, we turned to several sources approaching the topic from various angles.

Threats in Bursts

In its 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report, Cisco said malware is definitely becoming more vicious and harder to combat. “We now face everything from network-based ransomware worms to devastating wiper malware,” the report said. “At the same time, adversaries are getting more adept at creating malware that can evade traditional sandboxing.”

While encryption can enhance security and is used by roughly half of global web traffic, Cisco continued, encryption provides bad actors with a powerful tool to hide command-and-control activity. “Those actors then have more time to inflict damage.”

Artificial intelligence may help. “Encryption also reduces visibility. More enterprises are therefore turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence. With these capabilities, they can spot unusual patterns in large volumes of encrypted web traffic. Security teams can then investigate further.”

Cisco noted several other trends and findings:

• Short, pernicious “burst attacks” are growing in complexity, frequency and duration. “In one study, 42% of the organizations experienced this type of DDoS [distributed denial of service] attack in 2017. In most cases, the recurring bursts lasted only a few minutes.”
• Many new domains are tied to spam campaigns. “Most of the malicious domains we analyzed, about 60%, were associated with spam campaigns,” Cisco reported.
• Security is seen as a key benefit of hosting networks in the cloud. “The use of on-premises and public cloud infrastructure is growing. Security is the most common benefit of hosting networks in the cloud, the security personnel respondents say.”
• One bad insider can be a big threat, and a few rogue users can have a huge impact. “Just 0.5% of users were flagged for suspicious downloads. On average, those suspicious users were each responsible for 5200 document downloads.”
• It’s not just your IT assets that are at risk. Expect more attacks on operational technology (OT) as well as the Internet of Things (IoT). “Thirty-one percent of security professionals said their organizations have already experienced cyber attacks on OT infrastructure.”
• The multivendor environment affects risk. “Nearly half of the security risk that organizations face stems from having multiple security vendors and products.”

IoT Ransomware

Another observer taking stock is Aidan Simister, global senior vice president at Lepide Software, an IT auditing, security and compliance vendor.

Writing in a post on the CSO website, Simister predicted artificial intelligence will take a bigger role. Though AI may help the good guys, he noted, hackers can use it to launch more sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Further, new strains of malware can work around “sandbox” defensive techniques, waiting until they are outside the sandbox before executing their malicious code. Meanwhile, Simister agreed that the Internet of Things could become more of a target for ransomware, with hackers targeting power grids, factory lines, smart cars or home appliances to demand payment.

Many businesses, Simister predicted, will not comply with the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation on data protection and privacy (the thing you’ve been getting all those emails about). He predicted some companies would choose to ignore it, accepting the risk.

We’re also likely to see a growing number of companies adopt multifactor authentication in response to data breaches involving weak, stolen or default passwords.

Simister said he expects that more sophisticated security strategies may find wider adoption. These may include the use of “remote browsers;” deception technologies that imitate a company’s critical assets; systems to spot and identify suspicious behavior; better network traffic analysis; and “real-time change auditing solutions” that do things like detect abuses of user privileges or suspicious activity in files and folders.

Simister, though, also sees the risk of more attacks backed by hostile governments; in response, he predicts more efforts to train staff and to develop international sharing of information.

Privacy Paradox

One change in mindset visible in the market is a de-emphasis on the idea of “perimeter security.”

“You are not safe behind the perimeter, because the perimeter itself no longer exists,” Akamai argued on its website. “Today’s world is cloud- and mobile-driven, and the traditional moat-and-castle approach to enterprise security is no longer applicable for modern business practices.”

With applications hosted in various places and a workforce on the move, the company said, there is no longer a delineation between inside and outside the network. “As a result, seemingly every week there are new reports about high-profile data breaches and cyberattacks.”

Akamai chief technology officer Charlie Gero has argued in favor of what he calls zero trust security architecture. “Companies must evolve to a ‘never trust, always verify’ zero-trust model to secure against the wide variety of threats that exist and are constantly evolving,” Akamai stated.

Looking at the consumer economy more broadly, cybersecurity is only likely to become more crucial thanks to ongoing developments in areas as diverse as cryptocurrency, interactive smart speakers and mobile payments.

For example, a major trend toward platform personalization — whether it be on Facebook, Spotify, Wave or NextDoor — raises the privacy stakes. Venture capitalist Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers noted the massive amount of personalized data that people have put into such platforms.

That data, improves engagement and leads to better experiences for consumers, but it also helps creates what she calls a privacy paradox, she said in remarks at the Code 2018 conference: “Internet companies are making low-price services better in part from user data. Internet users are increasing their time on internet services based on perceived value. Regulators want to ensure data is not used improperly, and not all regulators think about this in the same way.”

Regulatory considerations are thus a big, uncertain element in this picture.

The Weak Human Link

Security should be an ongoing process, said Wayne Pecena, assistant director, information technology of educational broadcast services at Texas A&M University and director of engineering for KAMU Public Radio and Television, but it often tends to be treated as a one-time, set-it-up-and-forget-it event. Rather, cybersecurity is a never-ending concern.

“It is a continuous process of monitoring, evaluation, analysis, and prevention as the threat landscape is always in a state of change and evolution,” Pecena said.

“I would also not lose sight of the past, as ransomware, phishing [and] distributed denial of service will likely continue at an accelerated pace,” he added. “As cloud services and applications continue to expand, I would also keep the cloud cybercrime landscape or Cybersecurity-as-a-Service (CaaS) on my radar.”

In Pecena’s experience, most organizations do spend plenty of time and money in protecting their IT environment, but often the simplest areas can be overlooked while the focus is on higher-tech matters.

“Social engineering remains one of the largest threats to an organization, and the human factor remains a weak link,” he said. “The Internet of Things movement brings challenges, as most of these types of devices lack any real internal security capability and instead rely on external protection means.”

He also finds “crypto-mining” a fascinating area of concern as computing resources are hijacked for someone’s bitcoin mining applications. “Not necessarily destructive — like DDoS or ransomware — to an organization, [but] host computing resources can be [affected] such that legitimate application use is impacted. Malicious mining scripts can easily be picked up from a casual website visit, and this opens a new area for antivirus protection software.”

For Pecena, this recalls the days of desktop computers being unknowingly hijacked to serve music or distribute porn.

Those well-meaning hackers who returned to Washington recently hoped to draw attention once again to the issue of digital security. At least one pushed for government to play a larger role. But another said companies also need to take advantage of the tools and knowledge that are already available.

It was Robert Mueller — yes, that one — who is credited with saying back in 2012 that there are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be hacked.

Today that wisdom is often updated to read: “There are two types of companies: Those that know they’ve been hacked, and those that don’t know that they’ve been hacked.”

Manage accordingly.

Paul McLane is managing director, content, of Radio World and the Future TV/Radio/Video group.

Need to Know:Cybersecurity and Cable

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about cybersecurity — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

More from Future on cybersecurity:

• Cybersecurity and Television [TV Technology]
• Cybersecurity and Retail [TWICE]
• Cybersecurity and Radio [Radio World]
• Cybersecurity and ProAV [AV Network]
• Cybersecurity and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• Cybersecurity and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• Cybersecurity and Education [Tech & Learning]

As cybercrimes and incidents of institutional hacking increase, cybersecurity is a critical concern for big TV distributors that give consumers access to the internet.

It’s also a strange topic for cable operators, though, because it’s rarely discussed in public, beyond the chorus of concern from consumer data watchdogs.

The Federal Communications Commission, whose leaders have made lofty speeches about the importance of cybersecurity, offers a perfunctory summary of its cybersecurity objectives, with few details about its cable or telco initiatives, in describing the FCC Cybersecurity and Communications Reliability (CCR) Division.

Need to Know:Cybersecurity

NCTA–The Internet & Television Association and the American Cable Association emphasize that “the entire cable industry takes cybersecurity very seriously” and back security and risk management practices. But details about those efforts — or the failures in the system — are scant.

Still, the scale of cyber-threats to the cable industry is significant and growing. In Akamai’s Summer 2018 State of the Internet/Security: Web Attack report, the firm measured a 16% increase in the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks recorded since last year globally, with new and more devious attack methods noted.

There are also constant reminders of new threats. This past May, researchers found that U.S. customers’ WiFi connections could be harvested from a cable operator's bill or email. Comcast said it quickly disabled the vulnerability in its activation portal, established an additional layer of authentication and that no personal user info was ever accessed.

Steve Goeringer, principal security architect at CableLabs, said cable has been “at the forefront of cybersecurity of broadband” thanks to the DOCSIS cable-modem specification, which has employed strong encryption and authentication since its version 1.1. Subsequent updates have created further barriers to DoS and DDoS, he added.

“Delivering services the way they were intended, including protecting customer privacy, is always critical,” Goeringer said. He cited pirated over-the-top content, which aside from being illegal, also exposes consumers to malicious software and theft of personal information, and the growing presence of Internet of Things devices, which are often insufficiently protected and can bring malicious software into the system.

Kyrio, a CableLabs subsidiary that provides technology services, has been focusing on Internet of Things security. “Companies that can provide strong security at scale will be able to use that as a key differentiator for their products, protect their brand and future-proof their products,” Ron Ih, the company’s director of business development, said in a June 4 blog post. Putting an emphasis on cable’s growing involvement with wireless services, he observed that, “expanded wired and wireless connectivity accelerates the need for a more scalable security solution for these networked devices” in the IoT value chain.

CableLabs vice president of technology policy Rob Alderfer recently acknowledged the need for government/industry cooperation, especially in the fast-emerging IoT category.

“With the constant barrage of new cyber incidents, often driven by IoT devices vulnerable to exploitation, governments at all levels are taking notice and grappling with the rapidly evolving threat,” according to a CableLabs summary of his remarks at a IoT workshop. “Cybersecurity is no longer the domain of the IT department, but rather a key area of governance for all enterprises.” 

Need to Know:Cybersecurity

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about cybersecurity — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

More from Future on cybersecurity:

• Cybersecurity and Television [TV Technology]
• Cybersecurity and Retail [TWICE]
• Cybersecurity and Radio [Radio World]
• Cybersecurity and ProAV [AV Network]
• Cybersecurity and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• Cybersecurity and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• Cybersecurity and Education [Tech & Learning]

The race to build out “fiber in the sky” is on.

The next-generation mobile standard known as 5G, the fifth generation of the technology, is poised to create a new platform that is not just faster, but is much more agile than today’s state-of-the-art 4G (also known as Long Term Evolution, or LTE) networks.

Expected to debut wide in the next two years, it’s the latest in the continuum of every innovation in wireless technology, and it promises to disrupt — if not complement — many industries with lightning-fast communication speeds.

5G and Cable:Click here to find out what 5G means for the media industry.

5G will roll out as a network of cell sites offering Gigabit-level speeds (rivaling speeds offered via today’s wireline broadband) over the airwaves, with lower latency. (No more hourglass or beach ball icons!)

The technology will also underpin a vast array of fixed (non-mobile) and mobile devices, services and applications across an array of industries, including entertainment, education, music and medicine. Consumers need only a 5G-capable device to connect.

Deployments of 5G are already underway using pre-commercial technology by the usual suspects — the incumbent mobile network operators — but there are a host of new providers, including cable operators, who have become increasingly eager to add mobile and wireless to their service arsenals.

The first anticipated types of 5G-based services will be fixed wireless data offerings that can deliver speeds in the neighborhood of 1 Gigabit per second to the home or business. The implications for the Internet of Things, in a world where every home appliance and gadget is dependent on robust wireless connections, are enormous.

For traditional services, imagine downloading a full two-hour movie, or an entire semester of classes to a student, in mere seconds — while also supporting the massive data rates that will be required by new virtual reality and augmented reality services.

Further out, 5G will also be mobile, with sub-millisecond latencies that greatly cut down the time it takes for data to be transferred after it is requested. That will be a major requirement, for instance, for mobile networks that can ensure that self-driving cars stay connected and can navigate the streets safely.

For now, despite its futuristic reputation of sensors everywhere, 5G is saddled with technical hurdles. For example, 5G signals, particularly when delivered in the upper, millimeter-wave frequency bands, will need a clear path, as their performance is vulnerable to obstacles such as trees and buildings.

For the cable industry, 5G is viewed as a threat and an opportunity. While 5G could create a new speedy broadband rival, it will also require the deployment of millions of dense, high-capacity small cells that are in stark contrast to the macro-cell networks used by today’s 4G services. And it so happens that cable’s fiber-rich network is well positioned to provide those critical backhaul and powering requirements. That could be a major moneymaker for the cable guys.

Not-Ready-for-Primetime Player

When will all of the pieces fall into place? Though some 5G-based fixed wireless services will take hold in 2018, the big ramp for the technology isn’t expected to emerge until 2020.

Several mobile service providers, cable operators and startups such as Starry are already well downstream with 5G-based fixed wireless tests and deployments. The mobile aspects of 5G aren’t expected to take hold in a big way until 2020.

In the meantime, initial 5G-based fixed wireless deployments could put some pressure on wireline ISPs.

“The use case [for 5G] I get most excited about is the opportunity to have a nearly nationwide broadband footprint,” Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and CEO, said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, expressing confidence that 5G could serve as a fixed-line replacement for both business and residential customers.

“The capacity is there; the performance is there,” he said. “There’s going to be full Gigabit throughput.”

Mobile Making a Move

But that work isn’t stopping progress on mobilized 5G even before there are smartphones and other mobile devices that will support it. AT&T, for example, plans to launch a mobile form of 5G by the end of 2018 in about a dozen markets. However, the initial deployment won’t involve direct integration with laptops, smartphones or tablets, but instead rely on a smaller router-like device that can connect other devices to the 5G network.

“Think of this as a puck,” Stephenson said of the new device. He wants AT&T to push mobile 5G forward before handsets that support the next-generation wireless technology become available.

T-Mobile will be keying its 5G strategy on spectrum in the lower spectrum bands. While that will address the mobile opportunity, “it will also open up this massive set of opportunities on 5G in the Internet of Things space, where you can connect everything that can be connected,” Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s chief technology officer and executive vice president, said on the company’s Q4 2017 earnings call in February.

And the phone company plans to be aggressive. John Legere, T-Mobile’s CEO, said that 5G, when fully deployed, “will be in every spectrum band, and we will be participating in a lot of ways either through acquisition of spectrum, acquisition of companies, mergers and consolidation.”

But T-Mobile’s focus on the wide-area benefits of the 600 MHz band for its 5G rollout underscores a critical factor in that deployment: Not all spectrum is created equal. Millimeter wave signals don’t propagate well over long distances, have difficulty in the presence of trees and buildings and require an almost perfect line of sight.

“They hardly like air,” Robert Howald, Comcast’s VP of network architecture, said at an industry event last year. He was making a joke, but he also made an important point — it’s unlikely that any 5G strategy will be able to live successfully on millimeter wave spectrum alone.

There is much to be worked out, but 5G is poised to be a game-changer for anything that is connected, streamed or downloaded.

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about 5G — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

5G and Cable:Click here to find out what 5G means for the cable industry

More From NewBay on 5g:

• 5G and Television [TV Technology]
• 5G and Retail [TWICE]
• 5G and Video Production [Creative Planet Network]
• 5G and Radio [Radio World]
• 5G and ProAV [AVNetwork.com]
• 5G as a Platform [Sound & Video Contractor]
• 5G and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• 5G and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• 5G and Education [Tech & Learning]

5G may be the hottest thing in wireless and mobile technology, but the new standard needs one thing more than any other: wires, and lots of them.

For the cable industry, 5G offers a huge opportunity for new fixed and mobile wireless services, using cable’s core asset: endless miles of wires in the form of hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) architecture and a growing mix of fiber-only pipes. Optical fiber cable are thin strands of glass that carry massive volumes of data with light signals and minimum loss, and coaxial cable is the traditional lines cable operators use to deliver video, voice and data services to most customers.

Need to Know:5G — Riding Wireless’s Next Wave

HFC “is an excellent vehicle for that because it provides power, right of way and backhaul for all of that small-cell radio equipment,” Craig Cowden, VP of wireless technology at Charter Communications, said during a recent webinar on the topic hosted by CableLabs. “Whether we’re talking inside the home or outside the home, we believe cable is going to be the first truly scalable fixed mobile convergence platform.”

In other words, it may be a wireless network, but it’s going to need a lot of cells, and those cells need to be connected a wired network, including the kind that cable can provide.

Low Latency Needed

But in order to make that work across cable’s mix of fiber-only and HFC networks, operators need a low-latency solution. The cable industry is taking aim at that with a proposed technique called the “Bandwidth Report” (BWR), which aims to deliver super-low latencies by extending a technical bridge between cable’s high-speed DOCSIS network (used today for cable modem service) and 4G/LTE and “pipelining” the upstream packet schedulers of both sides.

Recent trials of BWR conducted by CableLabs and Cisco Systems showed that “DOCSIS is well-positioned as a viable backhaul technology for LTE,” John Chapman, a fellow at Cisco and chief technology officer of the company’s Cable Access unit, proclaimed.

Cable operators are particularly interested in a 150 Megahertz-wide batch of spectrum known as Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which resides in the historically underutilized range of 3.55 Gigahertz to 3.7 GHz.

“The 3.5-GHz band remains an important component of Charter’s wireless strategy,” the MSO told the FCC in a recent filing. Charter noted that it has been able to produce speeds of at least 25 Megabits per second downstream and 3 Mbps upstream in the so-called CBRS band tests being conducted in rural areas.

“Charter is certainly looking at that [CBRS] as a potential small cell technology that we would deploy both in the home and outdoors,” Cowden said on the CableLabs webinar.

Charter Communications is testing 5G-based technology in at least six markets with technology partners such as Samsung Electronics: Orlando, Fla.; Reno, Nev.; Clarksville, Tenn.; Columbus, Ohio; Bakersfield, Calif.; and Grand Rapids, Mich.

Comcast, meanwhile, has also asked the FCC for permission to conduct tests using the CBRS band in the Philadelphia area.

Other rival 5G tests underway:

• AT&T has been testing pre-standard 5G fixed wireless in Austin and Waco, Texas; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and South Bend, Ind., and intends to introduce mobile 5G-based service in 12 markets by late 2018.

• Verizon Communications plans to launch 5G-based residential broadband service in four markets in 2018, including Los Angeles and Sacramento, Calif. Verizon estimates that the markets included in that initial launch will span some 30 million homes.

• T-Mobile is accelerating its 600 MHz rollout this year, setting the stage for initial launches in 2019 and a nationwide 5G network by 2020.

• Sprint plans to launch a mobile 5G network in the first half of 2019 leaning on its portfolio of 2.5 GHz spectrum.

• Starry is using millimeter wave spectrum to deliver an uncapped, symmetrical 200 Mbps service in parts of Boston, with beta offerings available in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Other markets on Starry’s launch list include New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Miami and Minneapolis.

Need to Know:5G — Riding Wireless’s Next Wave

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about 5G — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

More from NewBay on 5G:

• 5G and Television [TV Technology]
• 5G and Retail [TWICE]
• 5G and Video Production [Creative Planet Network]
• 5G and Radio [Radio World]
• 5G and ProAV [AVNetwork.com]
• 5G as a Platform [Sound & Video Contractor]
• 5G and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• 5G and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• 5G and Education [Tech & Learning]

The race to build out “fiber in the sky” is on.

The next-generation mobile standard known as 5G, the fifth generation of the technology, is poised to create a new platform that is not just faster, but is much more agile than today’s state-of-the-art 4G (also known as Long Term Evolution, or LTE) networks.

Expected to debut wide in the next two years, it’s the latest in the continuum of every innovation in wireless technology, and it promises to disrupt — if not complement — many industries with lightning-fast communication speeds.

5G and Cable: Click here to find out what 5G means for the media industry.

5G will roll out as a network of cell sites offering Gigabit-level speeds (rivaling speeds offered via today’s wireline broadband) over the airwaves, with lower latency. (No more hourglass or beach ball icons!)

The technology will also underpin a vast array of fixed (non-mobile) and mobile devices, services and applications across an array of industries, including entertainment, education, music and medicine. Consumers need only a 5G-capable device to connect.

Deployments of 5G are already underway using pre-commercial technology by the usual suspects — the incumbent mobile network operators — but there are a host of new providers, including cable operators, who have become increasingly eager to add mobile and wireless to their service arsenals.

The first anticipated types of 5G-based services will be fixed wireless data offerings that can deliver speeds in the neighborhood of 1 Gigabit per second to the home or business. The implications for the Internet of Things, in a world where every home appliance and gadget is dependent on robust wireless connections, are enormous.

Blazing Fast Internet

For traditional services, imagine downloading a full two-hour movie, or an entire semester of classes to a student, in mere seconds — while also supporting the massive data rates that will be required by new virtual reality and augmented reality services.

Further out, 5G will also be mobile, with sub-millisecond latencies that greatly cut down the time it takes for data to be transferred after it is requested. That will be a major requirement, for instance, for mobile networks that can ensure that self-driving cars stay connected and can navigate the streets safely.

For now, despite its futuristic reputation of sensors everywhere, 5G is saddled with technical hurdles. For example, 5G signals, particularly when delivered in the upper, millimeter-wave frequency bands, will need a clear path, as their performance is vulnerable to obstacles such as trees and buildings.

For the cable industry, 5G is viewed as a threat and an opportunity. While 5G could create a new speedy broadband rival, it will also require the deployment of millions of dense, high-capacity small cells that are in stark contrast to the macro-cell networks used by today’s 4G services. And it so happens that cable’s fiber-rich network is well positioned to provide those critical backhaul and powering requirements. That could be a major moneymaker for the cable guys.

Not-Ready-for-Primetime Player

When will all of the pieces fall into place? Though some 5G-based fixed wireless services will take hold in 2018, the big ramp for the technology isn’t expected to emerge until 2020.

Several mobile service providers, cable operators and startups such as Starry are already well downstream with 5G-based fixed wireless tests and deployments. The mobile aspects of 5G aren’t expected to take hold in a big way until 2020.

In the meantime, initial 5G-based fixed wireless deployments could put some pressure on wireline ISPs.

“The use case [for 5G] I get most excited about is the opportunity to have a nearly nationwide broadband footprint,” Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman, president and CEO, said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, expressing confidence that 5G could serve as a fixed-line replacement for both business and residential customers.

“The capacity is there; the performance is there,” he said. “There’s going to be full Gigabit throughput.”

Mobile Making a Move

But that work isn’t stopping progress on mobilized 5G even before there are smartphones and other mobile devices that will support it. AT&T, for example, plans to launch a mobile form of 5G by the end of 2018 in about a dozen markets. However, the initial deployment won’t involve direct integration with laptops, smartphones or tablets, but instead rely on a smaller router-like device that can connect other devices to the 5G network.

“Think of this as a puck,” Stephenson said of the new device. He wants AT&T to push mobile 5G forward before handsets that support the next-generation wireless technology become available.

T-Mobile will be keying its 5G strategy on spectrum in the lower spectrum bands. While that will address the mobile opportunity, “it will also open up this massive set of opportunities on 5G in the Internet of Things space, where you can connect everything that can be connected,” Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s chief technology officer and executive vice president, said on the company’s Q4 2017 earnings call in February.

And the phone company plans to be aggressive. John Legere, T-Mobile’s CEO, said that 5G, when fully deployed, “will be in every spectrum band, and we will be participating in a lot of ways either through acquisition of spectrum, acquisition of companies, mergers and consolidation.”

But T-Mobile’s focus on the wide-area benefits of the 600 MHz band for its 5G rollout underscores a critical factor in that deployment: Not all spectrum is created equal. Millimeter wave signals don’t propagate well over long distances, have difficulty in the presence of trees and buildings and require an almost perfect line of sight.

“They hardly like air,” Robert Howald, Comcast’s vice president of network architecture, said at an industry event last year. He was making a joke, but he also made an important point — it’s unlikely that any 5G strategy will be able to live successfully on millimeter wave spectrum alone.

There is much to be worked out, but 5G is poised to be a game-changer for anything that is connected, streamed or downloaded.

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about 5G — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

5G and Cable:Click here to find out what 5G means for the cable industry

More From NewBay on 5g:

• 5G and Television [TV Technology]
• 5G and Retail [TWICE]
• 5G and Video Production [Creative Planet Network]
• 5G and Radio [Radio World]
• 5G and ProAV [AVNetwork.com]
• 5G as a Platform [Sound & Video Contractor]
• 5G and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• 5G and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• 5G and Education [Tech & Learning]

5G may be the hottest thing in wireless and mobile technology, but the new standard needs one thing more than any other: wires, and lots of them.

For the cable industry, 5G offers a huge opportunity for new fixed and mobile wireless services, using cable’s core asset: endless miles of wires in the form of hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) architecture and a growing mix of fiber-only pipes. Optical fiber cable are thin strands of glass that carry massive volumes of data with light signals and minimum loss, and coaxial cable is the traditional lines cable operators use to deliver video, voice and data services to most customers.

Need to Know:5G — Riding Wireless’s Next Wave

HFC “is an excellent vehicle for that because it provides power, right of way and backhaul for all of that small-cell radio equipment,” Craig Cowden, vice president of wireless technology at Charter Communications, said during a recent webinar on the topic hosted by CableLabs. “Whether we’re talking inside the home or outside the home, we believe cable is going to be the first truly scalable fixed mobile convergence platform.”

In other words, it may be a wireless network, but it’s going to need a lot of cells, and those cells need to be connected a wired network, including the kind that cable can provide.

Low Latency Needed

But in order to make that work across cable’s mix of fiber-only and HFC networks, operators need a low-latency solution. The cable industry is taking aim at that with a proposed technique called the “Bandwidth Report” (BWR), which aims to deliver super-low latencies by extending a technical bridge between cable’s high-speed DOCSIS network (used today for cable modem service) and 4G/LTE and “pipelining” the upstream packet schedulers of both sides.

Recent trials of BWR conducted by CableLabs and Cisco Systems showed that “DOCSIS is well positioned as a viable backhaul technology for LTE,” John Chapman, a fellow at Cisco and chief technology officer of the company’s Cable Access unit, proclaimed.

Cable operators are particularly interested in a 150 Megahertz-wide batch of spectrum known as Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which resides in the historically underutilized range of 3.55 Gigahertz to 3.7 GHz.

“The 3.5-GHz band remains an important component of Charter’s wireless strategy,” the MSO told the FCC in a recent filing. Charter noted that it has been able to produce speeds of at least 25 Megabits per second downstream and 3 Mbps upstream in the so-called CBRS band tests being conducted in rural areas.

“Charter is certainly looking at that [CBRS] as a potential small cell technology that we would deploy both in the home and outdoors,” Cowden said on the CableLabs webinar.

Charter Communications is testing 5G-based technology in at least six markets with technology partners such as Samsung Electronics: Orlando, Fla.; Reno, Nev.; Clarksville, Tenn.; Columbus, Ohio; Bakersfield, Calif.; and Grand Rapids, Mich.

Comcast, meanwhile, has also asked the FCC for permission to conduct tests using the CBRS band in the Philadelphia area.

Other rival 5G tests underway:

• AT&T has been testing pre-standard 5G fixed wireless in Austin and Waco, Texas; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and South Bend, Ind., and intends to introduce mobile 5G-based service in 12 markets by late 2018.

• Verizon Communications plans to launch 5G-based residential broadband service in four markets in 2018, including Los Angeles and Sacramento, Calif. Verizon estimates that the markets included in that initial launch will span some 30 million homes.

• T-Mobile is accelerating its 600 MHz rollout this year, setting the stage for initial launches in 2019 and a nationwide 5G network by 2020.

• Sprint plans to launch a mobile 5G network in the first half of 2019 leaning on its portfolio of 2.5 GHz spectrum.

• Starry is using millimeter wave spectrum to deliver an uncapped, symmetrical 200 Mbps service in parts of Boston, with beta offerings available in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Other markets on Starry’s launch list include New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Miami and Minneapolis.

Need to Know:5G — Riding Wireless’s Next Wave

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about 5G — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

More from NewBay on 5G:

• 5G and Television [TV Technology]
• 5G and Retail [TWICE]
• 5G and Video Production [Creative Planet Network]
• 5G and Radio [Radio World]
• 5G and ProAV [AVNetwork.com]
• 5G as a Platform [Sound & Video Contractor]
• 5G and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• 5G and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• 5G and Education [Tech & Learning]

The race to build out “fiber in the sky” is on.

The next-gen mobile standard known as 5G, the fifth generation of the technology, is poised to create a new platform that is not just faster, but much more agile than today’s state-of-the-art 4G (also known as Long Term Evolution, or LTE) networks.

Expected to debut wide in the next two years, it’s the latest in the continuum of every innovation in wireless technology, and it promises to disrupt — if not complement — many industries with lightning-fast communication speeds.

5G and Cable: Click here to find out what 5G means for the media industry.

5G will roll out as a network of cell sites offering gigabit-level speeds (100X faster than today’s highest speeds) over fiber lines, and lower latency (no more hourglass or beachball icons!)

The technology will also underpin a vast array of fixed (non-mobile) and mobile devices, services, and applications across an array of industries, including entertainment, education, music, and medicine. Consumers need only a modem to connect.

Deployments of 5G are already underway using pre-commercial technology by the usual suspects — the incumbent mobile network operators — but there are a host of new providers, including cable operators, that have become increasingly eager to add mobile and wireless to their service arsenals.

The first anticipated type of 5G-based services will be fixed wireless data offerings that can deliver speeds in the neighborhood of 1 gigabit per second to the home or business. The implications for the Internet of Things, in a world where every home appliance and gadget is dependent on robust wireless connections, are enormous.

Blazing Fast Internet

For traditional services, imagine downloading a full two-hour movie, or an entire semester of classes to a student, in mere seconds — while also supporting the massive data rates that will be required by new virtual reality and augmented reality services.

Further out, 5G will also be mobile, with sub-millisecond latencies that greatly cut down the time it takes for data to be transferred after it is requested, and will be a major requirement, for example, for mobile networks that can ensure that self-driving cars stay connected and can navigate the streets safely.

For now, despite its futuristic reputation of sensors everywhere, 5G is saddled with technical hurdles. For example, 5G signals, particularly when delivered in the upper, millimeter-wave frequency bands, will need a clear path, as their performance is vulnerable to obstacles such as trees and buildings.

For the cable industry, 5G is viewed as a threat and an opportunity. While 5G could create a new speedy broadband rival, 5G will also require the deployment of millions of dense, high-capacity small cells that are in stark contrast to the macro-cell networks used by today’s 4G networks. And it so happens that cable’s fiber-rich network is well positioned to provide those critical backhaul and powering requirements. That could be a major moneymaker for the cable guys.

Not-Ready-for-Primetime Player

When will all of the pieces fall into place? Though some 5G-based fixed wireless services will take hold in 2018, the big ramp for the technology isn’t expected to emerge until 2020.

Several mobile service providers, cable operators, and startups like Starry are already well downstream with 5G-based fixed wireless tests and deployments. The mobile aspects of 5G aren’t expected to take hold in a big way until 2020.

In the meantime, initial 5G-based fixed wireless deployments could put some pressure on wireline ISPs.

“The use case [for 5G] I get most excited about is the opportunity to have a nearly nationwide broadband footprint,” Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman, president and CEO, said on the company’s Q4 earnings call, expressing confidence that 5G could serve as a fixed-line replacement for both business and residential customers.

“The capacity is there, the performance is there. There’s going to be full gigabit throughput,” he said.

Mobile Making a Move

But that work isn’t stopping progress on mobilized 5G even before there are smartphones and other mobile devices that will support it. AT&T, for example, plans to launch a mobile form of 5G by the end of 2018 in about a dozen markets. However, the initial deployment won’t involve direct integration with laptops, smartphones, or tablets, but instead rely on a smaller router-like device that can connect other devices to the 5G network.

“Think of this as a puck,” Stephenson said of the new device. He wants AT&T to push mobile 5G forward before handsets that support the next-gen wireless technology become available.

T-Mobile will be keying its 5G strategy on spectrum in the lower spectrum bands. While that will address the mobile opportunity, “it will also open up this massive set of opportunities on 5G in the Internet of Things space, where you can connect everything that can be connected,” Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s chief technology officer and executive vice president, said on the company’s Q4 2017 call in February.

And the phone company plans to be aggressive. John Legere, T-Mobile’s CEO, said that 5G, when fully deployed, “will be in every spectrum band, and we will be participating in a lot of ways either through acquisition of spectrum, acquisition of companies, mergers and consolidation.”

But T-Mobile’s focus on the wide-area benefits of the 600 MHz band for its 5G rollout underscores a critical factor in the rollout of 5G: Not all spectrum is created equal. Millimeter wave signals don’t propagate well over long distances, have difficulty in the presence of trees and buildings, and require almost perfect line of sight.

“They hardly like air,” Robert Howald, Comcast’s VP of network architecture, said at an industry event last year. He was making a joke, but he also makes an important point — it’s unlikely that any 5G strategy will be able to live successfully on millimeter wave spectrum alone.

There is much to be worked out, but 5G is poised to be a gamechanger for anything streamed or downloaded.

Need to Know More?

Have a burning question about blockchain — or maybe request for a different topic you’d like to see us tackle? Email us at needtoknow@nbmedia.com and we’ll put our top minds on it!

5G and Cable: Click here to find out what 5G means for the cable industry

More From NewBay on 5g:

• 5G and Television [TV Technology]
• 5G and Retail [TWICE]
• 5G and Video Production [Creative Planet Network]
• 5G and Radio [Radio World]
• 5G and AV [AVNetwork.com]
• 5G as a Platform [Sound & Video Contractor]
• 5G and Residential Integration [Residential Systems]
• 5G and Pro Audio [Pro Sound News]
• 5G and Education [Tech & Learning]

If you weren't able to attend TV Technology and Broadcasting & Cable’s "State of Streaming: How OTT leaders view quality, opportunity shifts to live/live linear channels" webinar, sponsored by Akamai, you can check it out here. We want to continue the conversation on this very important topic, so have a look at the webinar recording and join in.

Click here to access the full recording.

The priority of OTT video service providers (OSVPs) is shifting. Live and linear have surpassed SVOD in importance as confidence grows among OSVPs in the quality and reliability of their services, finds new research from TVTechnology and Broadcasting & Cable magazines, sponsored by Akamai. How does this effect you?

The “Scale My Service: OTT Video Providers Closing in on the TV Benchmark,” report shares the perspectives of company managers with responsibility for technical implementation of video streaming services at TV broadcast stations, groups and networks, pay-TV providers, programmers, TV service producers and new media companies, including:

• Half of U.S. operators say their online service already meets or exceeds the quality and reliability of traditional TV or will do so within six months
• 70 percent say they are meeting or exceeding at least some of their KPIs, and 20 percent say they meet all KPIs
• Three quarters agree that quality remains an important parameter

Click here to download the full white paper.

Implementing HDR makes sense for your media operation if you understand that High Dynamic Range (HDR) is not just about more pixels, it’s about better pixels. Whether you are a content creator, broadcaster, cable/satellite operator or OTT streaming service provider, the opportunity is now as HDR video is expected to be the consumer technology taking the television experience to the next level.

To learn more about High Dynamic Range, download our latest white paper, Making Business Sense of the HDR Opportunity.