But as with most dire situations, there has been an upside. A weather event like this one demonstrates the huge demand for home video consumption. As one NBC News report put it, “for 57,000 students, it was another day for sledding, sleeping in and raiding the Netflix queue.”

At SeaChange — a leading video platform provider based in Boston — we see system performance that proves over-the-top and other types of video consumption skyrocketed
during the recent weather events on the East Coast. In fact, landmark rates of video-on-demand engagement with active stream percentages surged above maximum active stream rates throughout the Boston area by 88% on Tuesday, Jan. 27; 48% on Monday, Feb. 2; and 62% on Sunday, Feb. 8.

Moving south to Rhode Island, the situation was much the same. Surges extended to 129% on Tuesday, Jan. 27, and 87% on Monday, Feb. 2.

At SeaChange, employees were especially diligent about manning the fort these past weeks, knowing how important it was for customers to get some relief from the repetitive cycles of digging out, especially for those with kids at home. 

And while the latest avalanche of the white stuff has precipitated a sharp spike in video consumption, it is not, in point of fact, an isolated occurrence.  According to Rentrak, “electronic sell-through” of on-demand movies and TV generated $1.18 billion in 2014, up 46% from the year before; while adoption of subscription-based services such as Netflix jumped 36%, to $3.2 billion.

Moreover, industry analysts now expect VOD to explode into a $45 billion market by 2018.  This represents a disruption of epic magnitude in the media ecosystem because it clearly shows that, going forward, there will be no single fountain from which to drink. Instead, media delivery will take the form of a multiplatform river with an integrated array of offshoot streams designed to meet growing consumer expectations for on-demand, time-shifted, pay-per-view and downloaded video content whenever, wherever and on any device viewers want it.

Of course, such advanced delivery capability is particularly welcome during the cold, white days Northeasterners are slipping and sliding through right now. But as hard as it may be to believe, this snowbound land will one day take on a sunnier disposition. And when that day comes, it will be the continuity of the wintry entertainment experience that “keeps the digital home fires burning” through all the ups, downs and in-betweens of life regardless of snowfall totals, UV indexes or any other weather-related indices.

Jay Samit is president and CEO of Acton, Mass.-based video software provider SeaChange International.

The appetite for wireless video consumption has significant implications for cable's "TV Everywhere" initiatives as well as for broadcasters' nascent ATSC 3.0 plans, including their strategies in the upcoming incentive spectrum auctions.

Cisco's report was well-timed last week, coinciding with promises from Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam that pay TV will be a major driver for Verizon's 4G LTE networks. He cited Verizon's recent technology acquisitions that will accelerate its wireless pay TV introduction, but did not specify a timetable.

Cisco's VNI also presented a roadmap for greater voice-over-WiFi, which Jeff Baumgartner pinpointed in his assessment of the Cisco forecast, tying the VoWiFi outlook to Cablevision's recently announce plans for that service.

Collectively, Cisco's study plus ventures such as those planned by Cablevision, Verizon and others suggest a world of more competition -- in the marketplace on the airwaves.

Cisco's annual VNI "Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast" comes as a prelude to next month's World Mobile Congress, where new wireless applications dominate the dialogue, with video as a key ingredient. The study notes that mobile video traffic exceeded 50% of all mobile data for the first time in 2012. In 2014, it was 55% of total data use. By 2019, video will account for 72% of wireless traffic, Cisco says.

Most significantly, Cisco expects that, "More traffic will be offloaded from cellular networks [to WiFi] than remains on cellular networks by 2016."

The study finds that WiFi is already dominating cellular network usage in several key app categories (see chart) and that tablets are outpacing smartphones as the platform for mobile data traffic. For example, video streaming on WiFi to tablets accounts for nearly 21% of mobile data and about 20% of the data load to smartphones. In comparison, cellular networks carry barely 8% of data for video streams to smartphones and less than 2% to tablets.

The average amount of traffic people used each month was 15 Gigabytes in 2013; that doubles to 30 Gb by 2018. A per-household snapshot puts the average household at 150 Gigabytes per month. Globally, IP traffic is expected to triple between now and 2018.

That’s why the arrival of the latest in the cable-modem specification family, DOCSIS 3.1, can’t come soon enough, panelists at Monday’s DOCSIS 3.1 and Wireless Symposium noted.

“One reason why 3.1 is so useful to us is that we can get a 50% capacity increase upstream and downstream, from the same spectrum we’re using today,” Jorge Salinger, vice president of access architecture for Comcast, said. “Most of the work is already done — the silicon design is started, and at least three system-on-a-chip (SoC) vendors are working on headend silicon.”

And as bandwidth balms go, DOCSIS 3.1 is impressively packed with relief. Spectrally, the spec enables a 149% increase in extended upstream frequency (by potentially widening from a limit of 42 Megahertz, up to 85 or 204 MHz); in the downstream, it brings an 86% improvement, pushing the upper edge to as high as 1794 MHz (or 1.7 GHz).

Meanwhile, the shift to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), a modulation new to cable but broadly used in mobile and telecommunications networks, yields spectral efficiency improvements, too.

While it essentially makes vestigial the decades-old unit of measure that is the 6 MHz channel, OFDM widens channel widths from 24 MHz to 192 MHz, filled with tiny (25 kHz to 50 kHz) subcarriers. The upshot: Much more efficient spectral utilization.

Plus, when something bad happens — impulse noise, ingress noise or interference — only the impacted subcarriers impacted go down, not the entire channel, panelists noted.

And then there’s LDPC — Low Density Parity Check — again, new to cable, but not new-new. As a replacement forward error-correction technique to Reed Solomon encoding, LDPC brings with it both time and frequency interleaving, which will make 3.1-based gear bear up better when hit with burst noise, Belal Hamzeh, director of network technologies for CableLabs and a self-described “PHY guy,” said.

To assess the capacity gains of 3.1, Hamzeh and his colleagues built a model based on 20 million (3.0- and 3.1-based) modems, normalized to 6-MHz channel widths, and running on 256-QAM plant. The findings: DOCSIS 3.1 will deliver an estimated 46% capacity increase compared to DOCSIS 3.0, and if signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios were to continue to improve, every 3-decibel gain will yield another 10% in network capacity, Hamzeh said.

“It means that about 70% of your cable modems will be able to achieve 1 Gig QAM without doing any changes in the network,” Hamzeh added.