The eight-episode series, Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson, will debut July 26 and feature the comedians as they bring a comedic perspective to the Olympics’ best and most unexpected moments throughout the games, according to Peacock.

The streaming service will roll out two to three episodes per week of the series, which will offer a mix of Olympic-themed in-studio conversations and interviews, said Peacock officials. 

The series is the latest paring of the comedians on Peacock. Hart and Thompson hosted the special 2023 Back That Year Up with Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson.

“We can’t wait to be a part of the Paris Olympics and help hype up the audience with highlights from the best moments of the games,” Hart said in a statement. Added Thompson: “Kev and I are super excited to be part of the Paris Olympics by recapping performances from some of the world’s best athletes.” 

Hart and Thompson will also serve as executive producers of the series along with Bryan Smiley, Jeff Clanagan, Luke Kelly-Clyne, Kevin Healey and David Nickoll. 

Hart to Heart features Hart talking to guests ranging from A-list musicians and actors who are leaders and legends in their industries, according to Peacock. Season two guests include Pete Davidson, Jay-Z, Chris Rock, Mark Wahlberg, Tracee Ellis Ross, Mike Tyson, Saweetie, Tyler Perry, Kristen Stewart, Simu Liu and Seth MacFarlane.

“After an incredible first season of Hart to Heart, I couldn’t wait to get back in the chair to have more raw and hilarious conversations with some of the best in the business,” Hart said in a statement. “There is something special about sitting down with a glass of wine, it brings out honesty and hilarity in guests and delivers real conversations that you won’t get anywhere else.” ▪️

Shark Tank began season 13 in October. 

Hart’s films include Think Like a Man, Ride Along, The Secret Life of Pets and the Jumanji movies. He hosted the new year’s special 2021 and Done with Snoop Dogg on Peacock. 

Hart’s episode of Shark Tank features entrepreneurs with a tool “that takes snacking to the next level,” said Shark Tank; another team with a product made of space-age materials; another pitching a social network that connects fans to celebrities and influencers; and a team with a book publisher focused on Black content. 

Before the season began, O’Leary told B+C Shark Tank will feature a number of direct-to-consumer goods with sturdy digital platforms. “I don’t think I’m gonna see a lot of people saying, ‘I can’t wait to get my product into retail,’” said O’Leary. “Because that’s not where the growth is.” ■ 

Snoop and Hart take their seats at the desk from which they hosted Olympic Highlights With Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg on Peacock over the summer. The pair breaks down the highlights, and lowlights, of the year, including politics, pop culture, social media and sports.

Guests include Mark Cuban, DJ D-Nice, DL Hughley, Loni Love, Killer Mike, William Shatner, Stephen A. Smith and Michael Strahan.

“Snoop and Kevin cover some of the biggest stories of the year, but also highlight some less covered moments with their irreverent humor, inimitable charm and unique points of view,” said Peacock.

LOL Studios and Snoopadelic Film produced the 75-minute special. David Nickoll and Matthew Claybrooks are the showrunners and executive producers. Joining them as exec producers are Hart, Dogg, Jeff Clanagan, Candice Wilson Cherry and Sara Ramaker. ■

Harvey hosts Family Feud. 

Judge Steve Harvey is produced by Den of Thieves in association with Walt Disney Television’s alternative unit. Steve Harvey, Brandon Williams and Den of Thieves’ Jesse Ignjatovic, Evan Prager, Jared Morrell and Barb Bialkowski are executive producers, with Myeshia Mizuno the showrunner. 

ABC also announced it will air The Most Magical Story on Earth: 50 Years of Walt Disney World Friday, Oct. 1. Whoopi Goldberg will host the two-hour special. Christina Aguilera and Halle Bailey will perform in front of Cinderella Castle at Disney World, accompanied by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra. Anthony Anderson, Tom Brady, Candace Cameron Bure and John Stamos are among the stars scheduled to turn up.  

Goldberg is moderator on The View. 

The special “will take viewers through Walt Disney World’s humble beginnings in the swamplands of Florida and its evolution into a cultural phenomenon,” said ABC. “Through an expansive look into the past, present and future of the vacation destination, fans will get a never-before-seen-on-TV glimpse into the journey to bring Walt’s vision to life and a look at grand plans for the future.”

Disney executives past and present, including Bob Chapek, Bob Iger and Michael Eisner, will share their favorite memories of Walt Disney World. 

The special is produced by ABC News in association with ABC Entertainment and Disney Parks Global Content. David Sloan and Sally Conner are senior executive producers and Matt Lombardi is executive producer.

ABC also announced that season 13 of Shark Tank, which starts Oct. 8, welcomes four guest Sharks to the set. Emma Grede, CEO and co-founder of Good American and founding partner of SKIMS; actor Kevin Hart; Peter Jones from the BBC’s Dragons’ Den; and Nirav Tolia, co-founder of Nextdoor, will appear. The regular Sharks are Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John and Kevin O’Leary. Daniel Lubetzky, founder and executive chairman of KIND, also returns this season. 

Shark Tank is produced by MGM Television and Sony Pictures Television. Mark Burnett, Clay Newbill, Yun Lingner, Max Swedlow and Phil Gurin, Brandon Wallace, Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John and Kevin O’Leary are the executive producers. The series is produced by MGM Television in association with Sony Pictures Television.

Finally, ABC shared that Anthony Anderson, Tituss Burgess, Laverne Cox, Marcia Cross, Anthony Michael Hall, Melissa Joan Hart, Vanilla Ice, Tara Lipinski, Haley Joel Osment, Donny Osmond, Andy Richter, Tori Spelling, Raven-Symoné, Nia Vardalos and Johnny Weir are among the stars showing up on Celebrity Wheel of Fortune this season. The season begins Sunday, Sept. 26. 

Pat Sajak and Vanna White host. 

Celebrity Wheel of Fortune is produced by Sony Pictures Television.

Redbox has acquired 100 hours of standup specials and other funny (ostensibly!) funny shows from Hart's Laugh Out Loud (LOL) production shingle. The titles will be available on the Redbox app via the LOL! Network. 

The lineup of comedy series, stand-up specials and television shows from LOL will include All-Star Comedy Jam: I'm Still Laughing, All-Star Comedy Jam: Orlando, Gary Own: True Story, Kevin Hart: What Now? All Access, DeRay Davis: Power Play, Shaq and Cedric the Entertainer Present All-Star Comedy Jam, and more. 

Hart's series for now defunct mobile streaming service Quibi, a sendup of action movies called Die Hart, has been one of the most popular in a batch of shows acquired by Roku for the Roku Channel. Roku has renewed the series for a second season, rechristening the show as Die Harter. 

In January, Hart signed a deal with Netflix, making the top subscription streaming service the home for his lucrative feature film career. 

Redbox, meanwhile, expects to take its business public this year via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) IPO. The company hopes to transition its nearly 40 million kiosk customers into regular video streamers. 

 “Kevin has created a media powerhouse and we’re excited to add Laugh Out Loud’s amazing and hilarious content to Redbox On Demand," said Chris Yates, General Manager, Redbox On Demand.

Added Laugh Out Loud CEO, Jeff Clanagan: "Our goal at Laugh Out Loud has always been to be where the audience is. We are comedy in color wherever, and whenever, our audience wants or needs a laugh. Redbox has been a dominant force in home entertainment for years, and we’re excited to partner with Redbox to bring our catalog of original series, stand up specials, and movies to millions of households throughout the country.”

Peacock will launch its Olympics destination on July 15 and it will have live coverage of gymnastics and track & field. It will also have U.S. men’s basketball, but live coverage of the team will be available only on Peacock Premium.

Original programming on Peacock will include daily live shows, Olympic channels, even replays and highlights from NBC Olympic coverage. 

Rich Eisen will host Tokyo Gold, a daily look at the compelling performances with analysis and athlete interviews.

Lindsay Czarniak, Lolo Jones and MJ Acosta-Ruiz will host On Her Turf at the Olympics, dedicated to covering women’s sports at the games. Katie Ledecky, Allyson Felix, Alex Morgan, April Ross, and Alix Klineman will be among athletes featured. 

Cari Champion and Kenny Mayne will host Tokyo Tonight, which will bring fans into the Games with highlights, as interviews and feature stories every evening. Jac Collinsworth will serve as contributor to Tokyo Tonight on-location in Tokyo. 

Those shows will appear on the Tokyo Now channel. Other Olympic channels on Peacock include Great Moments, Meet the Olympians, Must-See Moments, Team USA and Tokyo Flame, an Olympic version of the yule log.

Other featured programming will be:

Olympic HIghlights with Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg: This commentary series, co-hosted by sports and Olympics enthusiasts Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg, will recap the Olympics’ most impressive displays of athleticism, as well as the moments that don’t go as planned. The series is produced by LOL Studios. Paul Pawlowski will serve as showrunner and executive producer, along with executive producers Kevin Hart, Jeff Clanagan, and Candice Wilson Cherry.

For Ball And Country: With the USA Men’s Basketball Team’s fourth consecutive gold medal on the line at the upcoming Tokyo Olympic Games, there is much at stake. For Ball and Country will follow the star-studded team as they represent their country. In addition to an all-access look at the 2021 team’s training camp in Las Vegas, the series goes into USA Basketball video vault with never-before-seen footage of this storied program. For Ball and Country is produced by Winik Media in association with USA Basketball and NBA Entertainment.

Golden: This series follows elite American gymnasts Laurie Hernandez, Morgan Hurd, Sunisa Lee, Konnor McClain, and MyKayla Skinner on their individual and intertwining journeys as Team USA hopefuls leading up to the Tokyo Olympics. The series is produced by UNINTERRUPTED, a division of The SpringHill Company.

The Sisters of ‘96: The 1996 USA Women’s Olympic Soccer Team:  When the U.S. Women’s National Team made it to the Olympic soccer in Atlanta, their gold medal match was not fully televised. Now, Peacock is making it available in full for the first time and debuting an hour-long special that reunites stars Brandi Chastain, Joy Fawcett, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly, Shannon MacMillan, Briana Scurry, and Tisha Venturini. 

Peacock also said  Amber Ruffin, host, writer and executive producer of Peacock’s late-night series The Amber Ruffin Show, will be on the ground in Tokyo providing her own unique, comedic analyses of the competition, as well as a look-back at her own experiences in the world of sports. 

Celebrity IOU attracted more than 17.5 million viewers to the first four episodes of season two in December, according to HGTV. 

The lineup includes Kris Jenner, Kim Kardashian West and Kendall Jenner; LeAnn Rimes; Kevin Hart, Gwyneth Paltrow, Darren Criss, Josh Groban, Ali Wong and Howie Mandel. The Jenners and Kardashian West are in the premiere episode. 

“Drew and I continue to be humbled by how many of these huge celebrities entrust us to be a part of their personal acts of kindness,” said Jonathan. “They can’t wait to roll up their sleeves and make these new spaces a reality as quickly as possible. The projects—and the fun—just keep getting bigger.”

The first episode sees the twins build a resort-style outdoor oasis for Kris Jenner’s best friend of 40 years, who recently lost both her husband and mother. 

“Each new story of thanks and appreciation makes such a huge impression on us,” said Drew. “That’s the magic of Celebrity IOU. We all want to give back to the people we love and seeing others do just that brings out all the good emotions.”

SCTE-ISBE announced that Cox Communications top technologist Kevin Hart will co-chair its big Cable-Tec Expo event, which aims to return to a physical iteration Oct. 11-14, 2021, in Atlanta.

The cable industry group made the announcement as it currently conducts a virtual iteration of its annual trade show, which opened Monday and culminates Wednesday.

Hart is executive VP and chief product and technology officer for privately held Cox, which is based in Atlanta. He helmed Cable-Tec Expo’s program committee in 2013 and 2017. 

The Society of Cable Technology Engineers is aiming to reconvene a physical conference presence amid predictions from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Dr. Anthony Fauci that the COVID-19 pandemic will be winding down in the latter part of 2021. 

“In the midst of the upheaval of 2020, one constant was how cable rose to the challenge of keeping us all connected,” Hart said in a statement. “The Expo 2021 program will arm our industry and our colleagues from other industries with the knowledge and ideation that will help us fulfill the promise of broadband in new ways that transform consumers’ lives.”

Celebrity Game Face will premiere on July 6 with Hart and his wife, Eniko, Terry and Rebecca Crews, Sarah Hyland and her fiance Wells Adams and Joel and Sarah McHale.

For McHale, the special will mark his first appearance on E! since he hosted Talk Soup.

While playing the game, the couple take on a series of ridiculous physical challenges, such as performing teen dance moves, feeding each other messy food, translating what their partners are saying with their mouths full and running through their home to find stray items that help them solve a riddle.

The winner gets the Hart of a Champion Trophy—a gold-plated statue of Kevin Hart as a baby—and all of the couples earn money for a charity of their choosing.

Celebrity Game Face is produced by Critical Content and HartBeat Productions. Kevin Hart, Jenny Daly, Tom Forman, Jon Beyer, Bryan Smiley, Mike Stein and Michael Carter are executive producers.

Hart is represented by 3 Arts, UTA & Schreck Rose Dapello Adams Berlin & Dunham. 

Comedians, such as Dave Chapelle, Kevin Hart, Amy Schumer, are scheduled to perform. The week long festival will take place April 27 through May 3. Chapelle will headline the event at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Wanda Sykes, Rosie O'Donnell and Margaret Cho will host "Stand Out," a showcase of LGBTQ comedians. Dave Letterman will host "That's My Time," which will feature interviews between the comedians and himself. 

The festival will also pay tribute to some of the great comedians of the past at the end of the festival on May 3 called “The Hall” and will be housed at the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y. George Carlin, Robin Williams and Joan Rivers are among the first to be inducted. 

“It's our honor to transform LA for one week into the funniest place on earth,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer in a press release. “...It's a chance for comedy lovers to come together and see their favorite artists as well as discover new ones, and for us to be able to share the electricity and excitement of the festival in Los Angeles with Netflix members around the world.”

Tickets go on sale Friday, March 6. Take a peek at an event promo here:

YouTube said that it will roll out several new shows focused on music learning and personalities that will be ad-supported, including the new season of Cobra Kai -- the reboot series based on The Karate Kid film franchise -- that has been renewed for a third season, said network officials.

The first two seasons of Cobra Kai will also be moved to an ad supported platform beginning this fall, according to the service. Those seasons were initially offered as part of the YouTube Premium subscription service.

“For today's viewers, primetime is personal and our content resonates so strongly due to the diversity and richness of our unmatched library and platform capabilities,” said Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl in a statement. “While every other media company is building a paywall, we are headed in the opposite direction and now have more opportunities than ever to partner with advertisers and share our critically- acclaimed originals with our global audience.”

Among the new shows being developed for YouTube include BookTube, Could You Survive the Movies, Retro Tech, Show Me The Evidence and The School of Life. The company also announced new projects with Justin Bieber and Tiffany Haddish.

Returning series include Kevin Hart: What The Fit, said the company.

The agreement calls for Hart (Night School) and his production company HartBeat Productions to develop and produce live-action, scripted kids’ content for the network, according to Nickelodeon officials.

“I’m excited to inherit this terrific content deal with Kevin Hart just as I step into my new role at Nickelodeon,” said Nickelodeon president Brian Robbins. “Kevin is an incredible talent whose appeal cuts across practically every age group and every member of the family. He knows how to create unforgettable characters, and I can’t wait for him and HartBeat Productions to focus their creativity on making great new content with us.”

Added Hart: “For me, Nick has always represented everything fun about being a kid, and it’s still at the forefront today of kids’ and family entertainment. I’ve been slimed at Kids’ Choice, won a lot of Orange Blimps and my kids are my very own built-in focus group, so I’m ready to dive in and make some next-level shows with Brian and everyone at Nickelodeon.”

Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer for Cox Communications, is set to chair the Fall Technical Forum for SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo, which heads back to Atlanta next year.

In that role, Hart will lead the committee that builds the Expo Fall Technical Forum, which includes an array of workshops on key industry engineering and business topics, and is a joint production of SCTE•ISBE, NCTA, and CableLabs.

Cable-Tec Expo 2018 is set for Oct. 22-25, at the Georgia World Congress Center.

RELATED: Talkin’ Tech

Hart, who chaired Cable-Tec Expo when the vent was held in Atlanta in 2013, takes over for co-chairs of this year’s show in Denver – Terry Cordova, vice chairman, business development-network and technology services, Altice USA; and Jim Blackley, executive vice president, engineering and information technology, Charter Communications.

“Year in and year out, Kevin Hart’s vision, commitment to excellence, and technology expertise have helped Cox be among the very best at transforming the lives of consumers,” Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE•ISBE, said in a statement. “Kevin’s leadership will be key to shaping an Expo program that will help to drive deeper understanding of the value of training, standards, and thought leadership as catalysts for improvement in operators’ bottom lines.”

“In a rapidly-shifting media landscape, it’s essential for cable to continue to prepare the technology workforce for the changes ahead,” said Hart, who took part in this year’s Multichannel News technology roundtable. “I look forward to working with the Cable-Tec Expo 2018 Program Committee to create an agenda that will provide SCTE•ISBE members and Expo attendees with the technical knowledge and industry insights they need to maintain our competitive edge well into the future.”

Before joining Cox, Hart was CIO of Clearwire and Level 3 Communications. He started his career with SBC Communications.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future

MCN:What matters beyond speed and throughput/range and reach for some of the services headed our way -- augmented reality, augmented discovery, VR, aging in place, automation, healthcare? Pick your favorite.
Jay Rolls: What matters is network latency, and overall visibility. Things like AR and health care and adjacent verticals -- it’s all about interactivity, and the rapid translation of photons to electrons.

Technologies like 802.11ax will help with the latency quest, which will be never-ending. And real-time, local visibility into how the network is running will help us to deliver a consistently high quality of experience, across devices.

Kevin Hart: We're very excited about home healthcare...around enabling the aging population. Just based on demographics, there's a huge need and a huge opportunity, but within the network some of the artificial intelligence and some of the connectivity speeds but also some of the privacy components around HIPAA-compliant information ...are also important.

The infrastructure we're putting into place, from a speed [perspective] is great, but privacy and security and latency, some of the real-time responses, I think will become even more important as you see more [need] for remote healthcare monitoring and more healthcare-centric solutions over time.

Dan Hennessy: Other network conditions start to come in to play here, like latency, jitter, and packet loss.
We have equipment distributed across our footprint and in our network that allows us to closely monitor these parameters – to ensure that we know if it changes, why it changed, and what it means to the customer. This will become increasingly important. New standards, such as DOCSIS 3.1, also have targeted changes to improve the quality of service.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

For sure, what we expect, and as discussed in context of IoT, is a continued growth in devices. Giving our customers visibility and control is key. Making sure their devices get the right priority, and remain secure, powered, live and connected on the network -- as more and more devices connect and need proper “care and feeding” -- becomes more critical to day-to-day life.

MCN: How has your reliance on the public cloud evolved over the last couple of years? Are you using more public or private cloud, and why does that matter?
KH: It's really a hybrid of all of the above, based on the use case. We're doing a lot of things internally and some our own cloud capabilities with infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service and some of the things we're doing around virtualization. We also use third-party clouds where it makes sense, based on their skillsets and capability. And from a managed service perspective, we have some product and service offerings leveraging cloud-based components. But now that you've adopted this hybrid cloud environment, it's now about how do you optimize it for performance and cost and security -- that's probably the next frontier.

JR: We rely on both -- private and public. Both are good at different things, and the crux of it is taking advantage of what they’re good at. For instance, the public cloud is good for things that need velocity -- prototyping, instantaneous scaling. The private cloud is more for things that are in production, which need to be highly secure. A good example is cloud DVR. Cloud DVR is obviously going to need a lot of cloud infrastructure, but it’s also well understood, with well-defined metrics. Because you know how it’s going to perform, it’s just going to be more cost effective to do on a private cloud.

MCN: What is the right balance of engineering talent you need these days, and how do you attract it?
Tony Werner: We do a lot of recruiting, especially when we’re speaking at non-traditional industry events. The right balance is a tricky task - we still need RF engineers, because we still operate a lot of RF. We still need infrastructure experts, because we operate a significant infrastructure. In general, though, it’s software, systems, and architectural engineering talent that we seek. We’ve made significant strides in how we attract that talent, primarily by making sure that Comcast is a great environment for developers and innovators to come work, but we can always do more.

JR Walden: We're finding less need for HFC talent every day, in part because you still have a lot in the organization, so demands are kind of in the decline. Five to ten years ago, it was hard finding network skills. The battle for high-speed data is over. Cable has won. And most people in professional areas see that, so people with networking skills who have interest in being in the internet business are finding us a lot more than ever before.

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

The area of challenge is on the software side. That has been tougher. I guess the good news is that being near New York doesn’t make for the most inexpensive job market, but people with those skills in New York are definitely not working for .com companies. At least I'm not competing for that talent. We've been plucking millennials straight out of college and teaching them ourselves and hoping that they don't leave too quickly. But we seem to be doing okay keeping the folks we have sort of home-grown.

KH: Investing in our people and our talent is a top priority at Cox in both product and technology and training and skillsets. [In early October], my team worked on an operating model of the future for the team, but software-enabled everything is critical, virtualization is critical, cybersecurity skills are paramount.

We bring in talent through recruiting and through our third-party vendors and we also have a very robust co-op and intern programs, and interns from leading schools like George Tech right here in Atlanta. Tulsa is one of our markets, and they have one of the top cybersecurity schools in the country. We're bringing in interns and co-ops and recruits from these feeder schools and also brining in talent with a lot of experience, as well, from some of these new trending areas, like mobility, IP, cybersecurity, etc.

DH: Our move away from closed vendor ecosystems to open, embedded software development -- either directly ourselves or with partners – means we must ensure that we have the right talent onboard. It’s these engineers that drive our business forward.

Over the last 12 months we have brought our technology group together across Europe, which gives a truly global opportunity for our engineers and developers to build products and services -- all the way from the UK, Germany and Switzerland, through to Eastern Europe, and across to Latin American and the Caribbean. Whether it’s fixed or mobile access, Internet, TV and video, or a full suite of B2B services. That’s a pretty rare opportunity.

JR: The right balance is the technologist who has a degree of nimbleness between hardware and software, and tends to think about things from a systems perspective. We’ve been surprised to see talent coming to our Denver engineering groups from Silicon Valley. The recurring themes appear to be both quality of life, and cost of living. I think you’ll see more and more evidence that shows a talent shift in our collective direction, and that’s really gratifying.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable

Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent


MCN: To what extent are you gearing up to automate people’s homes to make them more useful?
Dan Hennessy: Our automation focus is very much linked to our core products and services, and where we can bring clear value right now: Voice search and control of our video services. Ensuring that all our platforms work in harmony. Installing new hardware in the home, like WiFi APs, such that it happens seamlessly. Giving customers a way to easily onboard third party IoT devices in their home.

What’s as important here is the business logic we’re building in our back office for “connectivity services.” It’s similar to what we’ve done for our video products and services, in terms of having a flexible, microservices-based back end that is open to third party integration.

JR Walden: We're an Icontrol affiliate [Comcast and Alarm.com bought pieces of Icontrol earlier this year]. It hasn’t been a huge business for us. I think we have concerns that trying to compete with CE companies in that space...is going to be tough for Icontrol, let alone Mediacom.

We want to be a service provider. We think we're good at being a service provider, so what’s the service here? We imagine providing some services to help facilitate and manage the customer's smart home and IoT device future. I don't know if we'll manage the service as a whole...but we think there's a place to play there. Like maybe you could use your Amazon Echo to do things on your TiVo set-top box...rather than using the remote or using a voice remote.

Rather than trying to be the guy who does everything, let's work with what people want, even if Google Home is the device or it's an Amazon device. We’re going to come out with a voice remote, too, that works with Nuance [Communications].

Kevin Hart: We're making great advances in our connected home and smart home platforms. We’re leveraging the existing platform, but we've also got other future-state possibilities, and coupling the Cox HomeLife platform offering with our Panoramic WiFi [product]. We've been going market to market and connecting a home and making it a true smart home with over 50 or so connected devices in the home, and virtual reality and home care demos, robotic dogs, you name it. We're also doing a little bit some remote healthcare monitoring. There's a lot of possibilities here and I think we're just scratching the surface of the industry.

Tony Werner: With the combination of xFi and Xfinity Home we think we’re in an ideal position to give our customers a simple one-stop solution for controlling their connected homes. With xFi, we take the mystery and guesswork out of our customers’ home WiFi networks, providing a real-time dashboard of what devices are on the network and how they are performing. With Xfinity Home, we’ve combined a powerful home security solution, with an increasingly integrated IoT hub. Through our “Works With Xfinity” program, our customers can control their Nest thermostats, August locks, Chamberlin garage door openers, and many other popular IoT devices all from their Xfinity Home app. We are continuously bringing more partners onto the platform. On the backend, we’re leveraging machine learning and our own homegrown rules engine to give our customers more pinpoint control over how their connected homes work.

MCN: In what ways is AI and machine learning guiding your technology strategy?
DH: AI and ML already exist in our businesses in a number of different areas -- both embedded in our products and services, and also as part of a number of new avenues we’re investigating. Not just customer facing, but for operational and engineering analytics use cases, too.

We’re using machine learning, for instance, to help us fine tune our understanding of how WiFi performs in our customer’s homes. RF modeling, and knowing those behaviors, can get us so far. Adding in telemetry from our devices in the field, and ML in the backend infrastructure, takes our insights to the next level.

Additionally, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the associated AI is already deployed as part of our voice search and personalization services. We see much more applicability here in the front lines of our business, where interactions across 24 million customers can be tailored much more accurately.

The key with AI and ML is telemetry and data management. To leverage these techniques, we need to be able to collect and analyze data. From that, we can affect changes back into our services and infrastructure -- whether this is across the network, our service platforms, or our care and operational support systems.

A big step in the right direction is to understand the art of the possible. We’re starting to innovate with partners, internally. We’ve started with multiple trials, and some first deployments as well.

Jay Rolls: Both AI and ML will play an increasing role across our technology stacks, from network management to troubleshooting to connecting customers with the content they want. I think as our networks become denser and more complex, adding more intelligence will help us mine data that matters to the overall success of the businesses.

MCN: What does the Internet of Things mean to your company?
KH: From a product standpoint, some of the analytics that are built into the products, whether they’re visual analytics or voice analytics are making the products more intelligent and more personal. The voice remote stuff is cool on the front end, but having contacts and predicting your next couple moves in the connected home are a big part of what you'll see more and more of on the product roadmap.

From a technology operational network perspective, there's things we are doing with software-defined networking and some of the intelligence we’re building in through software and quality of service and latency. And from an operational perspective, doing more and more with some of the artificial intelligence around quality of service, call-in rates and truck roll reduction and customer experience. It's early days, but we've seen some very promising results.

JR: Whether it’s ensuring security and privacy, or connecting customers to specific capabilities, like health monitoring and wellness -- the IoT scene, which our customers are bringing onto our networks by the handfuls, enables us to take a customer-centric approach. The key to the IoT and our industry is that it’s based on the common denominator of connectivity.

TW: We are committed to AI and machine learning, because we’ve seen firsthand how those technologies can make our products better and improve the customer experience. We use AI and Machine Learning algorithms today to advance and refine our Natural Language Processing platform, detect and fix incidents in our network, and help our customers find content they love. We’ve got a first-rate team of PhDs working on these technologies day and night, and customers are already seeing that reflected in the products they use every day.

DH: Opportunity, more than anything. We’re seeing an explosion in connected devices, for sure, and the need for seamless onboarding, increased visibility, control, configuration and management. This is a key consideration as we think about how we develop our connectivity products and services.

Our customers rely on us to ensure their home network is secure, effective, and above all, is just there. Available. The key will be which devices and services our customers bring into their homes. The IoT market remains fragmented, from a service and technology standards point of view (Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT etc.) We’re experimenting with most of these.

We also see many new partnership possibilities opening up, with both established and new players. The IoT landscape brings in very diverse industries -- from lighting, to kitchen goods, home security and other utilities. How these will play out, and where the value and roles lie, is still a work in progress.

Beyond residential, we’re seeing plenty of interest in the B2B segment. We have a number of trials with home builders and commercial real estate firms, where mutual opportunities exist. Whether it’s environmental sensors and control, WiFi coverage and management, broader sensor and device onboarding, or management.

MCN: What matters when the task is securing the physical home, as well as the digital stuff in it?
TW: One of our over-arching product goals is to provide equipment and services that behave like a courteous guest in the home. Always there, always on, always connected, and pleasing to the eye, but also always on the lookout. Our Xfinity Home product started out as a physical home security offering, and quickly expanded into automation and smart home. A big part of that overall philosophy is to safeguard for both physical belongings, and digital identities.

JR: It’s a one-word answer: Trust. We’re in a unique position, because we are poised to protect between the physical, and the digital. As IP-connected devices proliferate, in the home and the business, we are becoming the trusted entity. Both for reliable service, as well as stewards of security.

DH: Trust is key here, of course – with an operational model that truly supports the offering. In both residential and B2B markets, local regulation and standards compliance will influence our interest and ability to enter this market. We also don’t see (for now) the same degree of demand as we see in other markets (notably North America) for these services.

The focus of the cable industry used to be a lot simpler. Its lens was generally trained on how to deliver and wield a quality package of pay TV, broadband and voice service that could be used to thwart competition from the telcos and satellite-TV providers.

These days, those service and tech strategies also place a heavy emphasis on wireless (WiFi, in and out of the home, and mobile) and over-the-top video (as an emerging competitor and complementary offering). To support current services and those that are out on the horizon, cable operators are also moving ahead with strategies and architectures that help them use their existing bandwidth more efficiently, or by adding capacity through projects and initiatives such as DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex DOCSIS.

To get a fix on these areas of importance ahead of this month’s SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver (Oct. 17-20), Multichannel News caught up with a handful of top technology and engineering executives.

Taking part in this year’s virtual tech roundtable — an aggregation of separate interviews with MCN technology editor Jeff Baumgartner and columnist Leslie Ellis of Ellis Edits — were:
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications;
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global;
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications;
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications; and
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable.

The 2017 Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

MCN: What are your priorities, as it relates to network capacity?
Jay Rolls: Our priority is to constantly balance capacity against demand. It’s a never-ending quest. We watch it very closely, and we’re very pragmatic about it -- the volume of tools, metrics and ways to see what’s really happening, and invest accordingly, is really deepening in ways that matter.

Tony Werner: We’ve been on a pretty steady path of doubling our network capacity every 18-24 months for several years, and I don’t see anything that makes me think that will change. We’re making better and faster products for our customers who expect and deserve world-class online experiences, and the network has to deliver on that promise. The key from my perspective is staying ahead of that curve in a way that’s smart and future-proof. We’ve been strategically extending fiber further into our network to meet customer demand, and that effort, combined with our commitment to deploying DOCSIS 3.1 has given us a network that’s powerful, flexible, and ready for what’s next.

JR Walden: We have completed the removal of all the analog channels. That was the big step one. Step two was to start transitioning high-speed data over to DOCSIS 3.1, so we're not adding any more 3.0 channels, and reuse spectrum for 3.1, which is a bit more efficient. The whole company is 3.1, all of the modems we're buying since June have been 3.1, so we've begun that next transition. 

We're in the process of migrating to MPEG-4, mostly the HDs. That's following along with some of our set-top refresh -- getting some of the old MPEG-2-only capable boxes out of the network and we can transition more of the channels to MPEG-4. 

Right on the heels of that, we're going to start moving some channels, the lower-viewed channels and some premiums, over to IP. We're also reducing node sizes. We average about 285 homes to 290 homes per node as an average. 

Kevin Hart: Ultimately, our goal is to continue to provide a great customer experience with a competitive broadband product and service. To do that, we are continuing to keep pace with downstream and upstream data rates, which is key to being competitive with our speed offerings, and quality of service. Reducing latency is also a top priority.

We’re investing in the network and in those growth rates, in terms of downstream and upstream speeds. Those are key drivers. Ultimately, providing that in-home or on-premises (business) experience, with our WiFi products — is equally important.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

Dan Hennessy: We see demand increasing by up to 45% across our markets and in recent years, we responded with a wide deployment of CCAP [converged cable access platform] equipment throughout our footprint. That investment, along with ongoing node size optimization, enabled us to increase capacity at a much faster rate. As a result, 70 – 80% of our plant will be DOCSIS 3.1 ready by the end of next year, giving us a path to even greater capacity expansion allowing us to continue to increase the available capacity across our access network, upstream and downstream 

MCN: What is your strategy with regard to fiber?
TW: Suffice it to say that fiber plays a key role on our network architecture. Our network today contains more than 150,000 route miles of fiber, and to meet customer demand, we extend fiber further into the neighborhoods we serve each year. When it comes to delivering gigabit speeds, our focus is obviously on DOCSIS 3.1, and our new xFi Advanced Gateway, which will bring Gig availability to more people, in more markets than ever before. But part of the reason we’re able to deliver that capacity is because we’ve systematically enhanced our network with fiber.

I feel pretty strongly that the best path ahead is to leverage the existing coaxial network and DOCSIS resources to the fullest, then inch towards FTTH, over time. Why? Because we can. We don’t have to build an entire network just to turn up one customer.

KH: Once you leverage the existing coax that we have, by taking fiber deep toward an N+0 architecture, we're future-proofing our investment , we're positioning ourselves to leverage DOCSIS 3.1, and also position ourselves for Full Duplex, because symmetrical speeds will be important. 

And we're also thinking about the fiber investment and fiber deep as it relates to our wireless strategy, enabling some of our customer with a small cell strategy but also positioning ourselves to take advantage of that in the future as well as thinking about fiber deep to benefit both residential and our commercial customers simultaneously. 

We've got a ten-year network 2.0 network transformation plan, and fiber deep, DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex are at the core of what's driving the investment. 

DH: We’re aggressively future-proofing our network. Over 80% of our new build program is based on a combination of either fiber-deep, retaining the HFC final drop, or fiber-to-the-home.

The U.K. is a good example -- that’s where our “Project Lightning” network expansion initiative is happening (announced in early 2015). Cable network build had been very limited in parts of the U.K. since the ‘80s, and until a few years ago and is now benefiting from this fiber strategy.

JW: [Fiber deep] is a bit further out, at least as a large-scale type of project. I think fiber deep for MDUs, high-density areas and some planned communities, higher end communities doing deeper fiber or fiber-to-the-home [is happening]. But as a wholesale [change] and going to node+0 kind of architecture, I don't see that in the next two years. 

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

JR: Fiber-deep is part of the overall capacity conversation. We’re constantly analyzing and monitoring our infrastructure, and matching those results against the technologies we have in our portfolio -- whether that’s DOCSIS 3.1, or taking fiber deeper, or Full Duplex DOCSIS. It’s a rational approach, where we’re trying to balance the needs, the available technologies, and the costs. DOCSIS 3.1 has some pretty remarkable capabilities, but it’s not necessarily a hard-and-fast reason to not take fiber deeper, for instance. Different situations drive different capacity decisions. There’s nothing universal about it -- you have to take it on a market-by-market basis.

MCN: To what extent will you use bridging techniques, like remote PHY & DOCSIS 3.1?
DH: We’re already trialing and testing both Remote PHY and DOCSIS 3.1 across our footprint. Our plan of record is to exploit virtualized and distributed access architectures.

Our strategy is fully focused on leveraging 3.1 and cost to upgrade is less than 20 Euro per home passed, so a very efficient way of getting to speeds of 1 Gbps-plus.

KH: We're making tremendous progress in calendar year 2017 on our DOCSIS 3.1 CCAP deployment. We started in earnest early in the year and by the end of this year, we'll have over one-third of our footprint 3.1-enabled with north of 90% of our footprint enabled with 3.1 by the end of 2018 and early 2019. We're definitely going to be leveraging a remote PHY architecture and some of the early stage testing around remote PHY currently. 

JR: They both play a role. Just like DOCSIS 3.0 and PON played a role in the evolution of the network over the past five years, DOCSIS 3.1 and remote PHY are going to play a major role in the coming years. Everyone will be using them, us included. Like everything else, it’s a matter of matching the right tool to the right task.

TW: I could tell you how committed we are to DOCSIS 3.1, but it may be easier just to lay out our progress to date. Since December 2015, when we provisioned the world’s first DOCSIS 3.1 modem on a customer-facing network, we have been aggressively expanding our D3.1-powered gigabit offering. Today, we have deployed D3.1 in 23 states and dozens of markets, with more coming online all the time. What I love about this technology is that it is a cost-effective way to make gigabit speeds a reality for a far broader cross-section of Americans, and not just to those lucky few who live in a few select neighborhoods. As for remote PHY and DAA [Distributed Access Architecture], both technologies are advancing at a breakneck clip, and I think you’ll hear more from us about them soon. 

MCN: What are the consumer factors pushing you toward the desire to provide symmetrical bandwidth, and eventually take advantage of technologies like Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX)?
JR: The world of applications and services continues to evolve, obviously, but so far we’ve been able to meet those needs with an asymmetrical topology. That said, things like real-time gaming, augmented and virtual reality, and the Internet of Things -- some of those will likely drive more symmetry in the network. It remains to be seen. Whether it goes completely crazy, or just nudges the demand on the network, it’s good to have techniques like FDX on the drawing board.

KH: It’s a little but further out on the horizon. The upstream growth rate is ticking up a couple of notches, but not to the tune that we would need significant additional capacity and/or a complementary need for symmetrical bandwidth. We're still testing that, but the experiences, the gaming, the latency and interactive [applications] and additionally connected everything, I think, will be drivers of higher need for improved symmetrical speeds. But at this stage, the symmetrical is a nice-to-have for residential and definitely will be a good option for our commercial customers. 

DH: Presently, both our products and the consumption of those products are highly asymmetric. While we see some increase in upstream demand from cloud-based services, we don’t see the asymmetry changing any time soon.

Because of that, we are actively engaged with CableLabs and industry partners on the development of Full Duplex. We see it as part of our future access toolkit.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|The Home of the Future|Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

MCN: What are your wireless priorities?
Dan Hennessy: We believe that connectivity to the home, around the home, and on the go needs to be a high performance, reliable and seamless experience.  As such, we are focused on three areas.

For fixed broadband connectivity services in the home, we want to ensure that our customers are able to benefit from the power of our network -- both to and around the home. That’s regardless of where they live, what their home is like (how big and what it’s made of), or how many devices they want to connect to their in home WiFi. This is where a significant amount of engineering and innovation effort is spent.

From a mobile services perspective, it’s about making sure our customers get the best quad-play deal and experience out there. To do that, we will build on our MVNO capabilities across our markets. Where needed, we want to leverage VoWiFi technologies, to solve for in-home/business coverage issues. As well, we want to ensure that our customers are able to leverage our WiFi access points--roughly 10 million, across Europe. The goal is to bring the fixed and mobile connectivity experience together, seamlessly. To give our customers the best of both.

The third areas is specific to where we have a full MNO footprint, such as in Belgium. Telenet’s acquisition of the mobile operator, BASE, presented an opportunity to upgrade and deliver a world-class radio access network -- alongside the power of a cable access network.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

Jay Rolls: First is the launch of WiFi-first MVNO service with Verizon next year, which will serve us well for our short- and medium-term wireless goals.

Second is optimizing the WiFi experience for our residential and business customers. So many people equate “the internet” to “the WiFi signal”! That’s why it’s important that we continue to improve everyone’s WiFi.

Beyond that, we’re conducting both lab and field trials of CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service), in the unlicensed 3.5 GHz spectrum, as well as 5G millimeter wave technologies for fixed use cases, like backhaul.

Kevin Hart: The in-home experience, the on-premises experience and the experience within common spaces in MDUs -- about a third of our residential footprint is multi-dwelling units, so having a having a best-in-class WiFi experience there is key. We've also done a ton with convention centers with hospitality networks and hotels. We made an investment in a company [Blueprint RF, acquired by Cox over the summer] that's going to be bring best in class WiFi for commercial businesses. 

We’ve done some 5G trials, in conjunction with CableLabs. From a technical standpoint, we’ve been one of the leaders in small cell deployments, because of what we’ve been doing with some of our key partners and customers. The 5G trial was a fixed point to point [test]...just to prove out some of the technology and the performance.

JR Walden: We've been focused on in-home WiFi for many years. Maybe 60% of our customers pay us for a managed home WiFi solution. About 90% of our new customers do take that product. We have also been rolling out community WiFi, or metro WiFi...in a number of our communities, but not as aggressively as some of the big guys as we tend to have more low-density markets. I’m not necessarily convinced there are any business models around that. The theory around that is it's a customer affinity [strategy]. But it's not super-expensive to do, so you don't have to gamble too much on that. 

In regards to getting into more of a mobile play, we certainly haven't announced any plans. We've certainly been looking at what options might be and things like 5G and CBRS or other kind of solutions might impact us, both as a B2B or wholesale kind of enabler, like we were with cell tower backhaul, but also potentially getting into the retail side. 

That's one of those areas we'd rather be a fast-follower, frankly, so I’ll root for Comcast or Charter or somebody to blaze a successful trail, and then maybe we'll be prepared to invest in that. 

MCN: What are you doing to make WiFi better or best in class?
Tony Werner: We’re committed to offering a fantastic Wi-Fi experience to our customers, and from our perspective, that means providing a combination of speed, coverage and control. When it comes to speed, our xFi Advanced Gateway is not just the fastest gateway we’ve ever built, we believe it is the best device available today anywhere in the world.

On coverage, we want our customers to have amazing online experiences wherever they go, in or out of the home. On the go, that means continuing to expand our network of more than 18 million Wi-Fi hot spots, and at home, it’s a combination of our world-class gateway, and our forthcoming pods, which will give customers who want it a powerful Wi-Fi mesh network that can blanket any size home with great Wi-Fi. Finally, on control, we really believe xFi is a game changer. We launched it in May to more than 10 million devices, and the response we’ve seen has been tremendous, both in terms of adoption, and customer satisfaction. Today with xFi, our customers can pause WiFi to their kids’ devices for bedtime or dinner (our most popular feature), track the activity of devices on their home networks, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.

In addition, as you know we’re big proponents of RDK-B, where the B stands for “broadband.” It’s similar intent to RDK-V, video, which is the core foundation of our X1 UI. RDK-B is piled with techniques and technologies to continuously improve WiFi experiences.

KH: On the residential side, our offering, called Panoramic WiFi with the tagline of "It's wall to wall fast," has had an excellent take rate from a customer perspective. NPS (net promoter score) is up significantly. It's a combination of having a better in-home device, a professional install and additional to make sure your signal strength, location, quality of service is what you want it to be inside your premises. 

DH: Our WiFi strategy focuses on both raw hardware capabilities, and the software we use to optimize for value and performance. Both solve for whole home connectivity. We are constantly evaluating hardware-related developments and standards to include in the equipment we deploy in customers’ homes.

Alongside that, we are focused on software developments (embedded and cloud-based) to optimize WiFi range, reliability and performance. That means channel optimization, air time fairness, band- and client-steering. We have a range of embedded software and cloud-based services going to market in 2017 and 2018.

We’re also looking at the best ways to give our customers the right equipment to ensure whole home coverage, from point-of-sale to care. This includes developing a mix of property profiling (size, fabrication etc.) and machine learning techniques.

Making WiFi better for our customers is very much about giving them visibility and control.

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

Ensuring all the hardware and technology we’re using works in harmony, such that the customer can see it, configure, it, and personalize it. We’re doing this with our “Connect” app, which – in addition to allowing them to manage their mobile tariffs and access hotspots while on the go -- brings all of this to the customer. Whether it’s parental controls, guest WiFi access, speed tests, onboarding of powerline devices, resetting passwords. It’s all the things our customers would and should expect. Meaning WiFi that consistently works well, with control in the palm of their hand.

JR: We’re currently deploying 802.11ac Wave 2 in the home, which has impressively nerdy feature names, like beam-steering and multi-user operation. Bottom line, they make the signals behave better in a given (and often hostile) environment. We’re also actively testing the benefits of 802.11ax, which works in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectral areas and enables multi-gigabit speeds.

On top of that, we’re planning a 2018 deployment of cloud-based radio resource management, which is all about optimizing the WiFi experience -- it takes some of what’s traditionally been processed locally, and pulls it back into the network. And, we’re testing some distributed WiFi solutions, to expand indoor coverage.

MCN: Is 5G an opportunity for small cell and backhaul, or a threat to the last mile? (A little bit of both?)
JW: The business model [for 5G] kind of confuses me some. For the markets that Mediacom operates in, which are much lower density than maybe the average -- we're well below 50 homes a mile. Although we don’t have as many line-of-sight issues with many tall buildings, the reach of these very high frequencies are really going to limit their use in lower density markets. 

I realize that Verizon and others are talking about 5G...but it's starting to feel a lot like 3D, in that there's a ton of talk about it, but when you go and look at the engineering, this is not going to be like LTE. When 4G came along, it was really about enabling a new frequency and new, more efficient protocols. This is fundamentally a different architecture. You're not going to enable with this with macro towers; you're going to have to build a whole new network to do this. And it's going to cost a lot of money. I think they have the performance to compete with landlines, but I don't think they have the capacity...at any cost-effective rate to really compete with landline. 

JR: It’s both, but probably more of an opportunity for backhaul. I mean, in rural areas, or very non-dense areas, having a wireless option, vs. wired, may make sense. We’re testing 5G for both, but to us it looks better for fixed use cases. That’s because millimeter wave comes with very large channel sizes, that can offer very high bandwidth -- but at those frequencies, propagation can be really challenging. Anything in the line of sight -- a tree, a building -- can mess things up.

DH: We don’t see 5G as a threat to the last mile. For starters, the economics aren’t there, at least in the foreseeable future. Plus, a 5G last mile will not offer the performance equivalent to fiber rich and deep access networks.

Spectrally, 5G performance will require larger bandwidths, which implies higher frequency spectrum and the use of advanced radio technologies, such as Massive MIMO or coordinated multi-site transmissions.

Higher spectral bands imply denser deployments of radio access nodes (smaller cells) with more backhaul locations, so for sure there are opportunities to scale backhaul revenues here.

When asked what a good coverage 5G access network might look like, I often point to one of our cable access maps showing our WiFi hotspots.

Ultimately, it’s not a question of 5G or cable access in the last mile. More, it’s a question of how will 5G radio access and fixed, fiber-rich cable access complement each other. Just like how unlicensed WiFi radio access compliments fixed cable access today.

KH: It is a little bit of both. From a technical perspective, we're taking advantage of some of the small cell opportunities.  

#NYCTVWK: ‘B&C’ Hall of Fame, VR 20/20 Kick Off Fifth Annual Event|Register Here

The two-hour event, Kevin Hart Presents: The Black Man’s Guide to History, will star Hart and will focus on historical African-American figures that people may not have heard about before. The special, produced by Hartbeat Productions and Comedy Dynamics, will highlight such figures as Matthew Henson, the first person to go to the North Pole, but did not receive the credit; Robert Smalls, a former slave who led a revolt on a Confederate warship and pretended to be the captain to evade capture; and Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut.

“Kevin is an extraordinary performer with a real appreciation for history,” said Paul Cabana, Executive Vice President and Head of Programming for History in a statement. “Only he could bring these true stories to life in such an entertaining way. We’re thrilled to be working with him.”

This isn’t your father’s “cable” industry anymore. In fact, the word cable is no longer spelled out in the name of the NCTA, which last week rebranded as NCTA-The Internet & Television Association.

But that also means that what used to be true about “cable” operators is no longer true today. Rather than focusing on one new product or service at a time, these new-class service operators have to juggle twelve balls at once in order to keep up with consumer demands and the competition.

To get a fix on what’s important as many people in the tech- and engineering-facing part of the industry converge on Philadelphia for this week’s SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo, Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner and Leslie Ellis, independent analyst and regular MCN contributor, caught up with some of the top engineering minds in the industry to discuss their priorities and to drill down into hot areas such as DOCSIS 3.1, wireless and mobile broadband, next-generation video, network virtualization and the shift to DevOps models.

What follows is an edited, transcript compiled from separate conversations with Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Cox Communications; Balan Nair, EVP and CTO of Liberty Global; and Sree Kotay, who was recently promoted to CTO and EVP of Comcast Cable.

Related: The Long Goodbye

TECHNOLOGY PRIORITIES

MCN:Let’s level-set the conversation with your technological priorities. What are the top one or two things on your to-do list for Q4 and the rest of the year?

Sree Kotay: Really? Only one or two? One is, we want to continue to lean in to building elegant, differentiated products. We’ve been focused on building better products and services, and that focus has had a profound positive effect. We’ve done a lot of that for TV, and want to do it for other services, across the board. So you’ll see us putting in foundations and building blocks this year, for some big things we’ll do next year.

Two is the customer experience, with a real focus on simplification and self-service. It’s an intense focus on how we engage with our customers — starting from the acquisition funnel, throughout the engagement — whether it’s self-installs or enabling people to resolve issues themselves. It’s an effort we’re internally calling “All Digital.” It’s about giving our customers a powerful blend of self-service, transparency and visibility.

Balan Nair: Right now, it’s mostly operational. If you really want to be a few steps ahead — and all trends indicate this — you have to change. Change is hard, but it’s mandatory. Mark Twain said that the only person who likes change is a wet baby. He’s right.

We’re in the middle of a company-wide transformation that we call “Liberty Go.” It’s about putting the customer front-of-mind, completely. Customer first, front of mind, sides of mind, back of mind. For real — to the point of making the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric part of performance bonuses.

Kevin Hart: First and foremost is our network transformation plan. We’re putting together a 10-year network transformation plan with the hallmarks being around DOCSIS 3.1, Node+0 architectures — taking fiber deep — and then eventually leveraging Full Duplex [DOCSIS].

No. 2 is our strategy around trying to own the home, better enable the home, better enable the customer experience. Things like our new WiFi offering that we’re launching called Panoramic WiFi. It’s also the work that we’re doing on new Contour, our new video experience, and we’re continuing to make great progress with Cox Homelife, our home security/automation platform.

MCN:Can you elaborate on the foundations and building blocks in the works?

Kotay: On the technology side, it’s obviously all the DOCSIS 3.1 work, looking at broadband and our XB6 [Gigabit gateway], which comes out of a lot of work on RDK-B, where the “B” stands for “broadband.” It’s radically improving visibility as a functionality to move up the value chain. As we think about connected services, that’s one big element. In particular, we’re focused on digital relationships, and evolving to serve the people in the house, not only the household address.

HOT TOPICS IN TECH

MCN:WiFi: The hype machine around “smarter WiFi” and “intelligent WiFi” is pretty loud. What factors go into building a competitively superior WiFi service offering?

Kotay: If you look up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with self-actualization at the top, and air, water, food and shelter at the bottom — there seems to be a new element in that bottom slice, and it’s WiFi. And the thing is, when people say “WiFi,” they usually mean “end-to-end connectivity:” My device is online, it’s working and I can get to the services I want.

A lot of previous approaches have been focused on slivers of that problem. We fell into that category — well, you’re connected with the CMTS, so you should be good! But the reality is, you have to look at the whole chain. It’s not just the access layer, or the in-home things like speed and reach. It’s the data centers, the back-end services, the care and the end-to-end-ness of it.

For instance, if you have a gaming console connected over WiFi to my gateway, I should know it’s a gaming console, what kind of console it is and whether there are any issues impacting its connectivity, whether on our end or somewhere else in the chain. The Internet is inherently a best-effort service. So we have to think about how to make it more than that — more carrier-grade, in a sense. Like broadcast video quality, in that it really, really works, all the time. It’s not just about any sliver of that chain. It’s the whole end to end. Our industry is uniquely positioned to tackle that challenge, but it takes a significant amount of focus and attention.

So the lesson to us was, let’s stop thinking about it as just WiFi. “WiFi” has to mean all of it.

Nair: People say content is king. My boss likes to say that connectivity is king, and content is Kong. WiFi is obviously a big part of “connectivity.” The world is moving away from single-point WiFi access. We’ll have to look at a mesh network in the home, to achieve a very high quality of service. Step 1, we improve quality at the chip level; 2, improve the antenna(s). Next, embed the software that enables us to optimize things like beam-forming. All of that enables us to do a whole-home, holistic WiFi view.

MCN:Kevin, tell us a bit more about this PanoramicWiFi offering.

Hart: Eighty percent to 90% of the devices connected in the home are enabled by WiFi by our customer base. Enabling a better in-home WiFi experience is top of our list. Panoramic WiFi will have a tagline of, “It’s wall-to-wall fast.”

We’ll be implementing some of the best-in-class WiFi gateway routers and will be leveraging over time the RDK-B component within those routers. We’ll be installing extenders, depending on the size of the room and the [performance] of the signal quality, and focus on ease-of-use.

We’re also going to be accompanying that with some additional focus from our techs in terms of the setup, giving them more set-up time to ensure quality of service and signal strength

We’re launching that in the fourth quarter, in our California market, and then we’ll be taking it more broadly in 2017.

WIRELESS AND GIGABITS

MCN:Multiple choice, with LTE-U and its impact on Wi-Fi capacity: 1.) Battle stations!; 2.) If only that were my biggest wireless concern! 3.) Don’t worry, MuLTEFire will fix everything.

Nair: We have to look at this from two sides — as a WiFi provider, and as a mobile business operator. Which means my answer is a little bit of all three. It’s “battle stations,” because if connectivity is king and it goes away, that’s a real problem. It’s certainly not our only wireless concern. That said, I’m confident that our collective work with MuLTEFire and other standards bodies will help. [Liberty Global and CableLabs announced last week they have joined the MuLTEFire Alliance.]

Hart: I think it’s No. 2. I think there has been a lot of good work with the different organizations, including CableLabs and the Wi-Fi Alliance, to sort out some of the interoperability and co-existing requirements of LTE-U. I’m pretty sure that’s going to work itself out over time.

I think trying to drive that in-home WiFi experience and also continue to build out our WiFi footprint where it makes sense are some of the things that are at the top of our list. And we’re also keeping an eye on some of the advances of 5G from a wireless standpoint. It’s both an opportunity for us and also a potential threat.

MCN:Gigs and competition: Two years ago, we asked (some of you, anyway) about Google Fiber’s threat to expand to a bunch more metros. Now, Google Fiber is being dragged through the mud by the Silicon Valley press, suggesting trouble in Google Fiber-ville. How does (or doesn’t) that impact your Gigabit deployment and/or “fiber deeper” strategies?

Hart: We launched our G1GABLAST product a couple of years ago and have had some really great success with that. Obviously, Google’s not the only one building out fiber. There’s AT&T and many, many others. That specifically hasn’t had that big of an impact. We’ve always been committed to investing in our network, building out ubiquitous speeds and making sure we can deliver at peak hours with minimal congestion.

I mentioned the 10-year network transformation plan: Starting right now and into next year, DOCSIS 3.1 is high on our radar, so we’re making great strides with the testing, deployment and trials of 3.1.

We definitely have a fiber-deep strategy and an N+0 architecture that we’re working towards. We’ll be doing that both to keep up with speed and contention and just to deliver a better quality of service. And taking fiber deep is also key to enable Full Duplex, ultimately, which will come after 3.1 to enable more symmetrical Gig speeds.

Yes, we’ll definitely keep our eyes open on the competitive landscape, but we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing for a couple of decades and keep investing in our network.

Nair: We’re big on Gigs. Our bull’s-eye product right now is about 200 Mbps. At a traffic engineering level, though, our peak downstream usage is in the 900 Megabit-per-second range in some markets. 920 Mbps is pretty close to 1 Gig. If you consider a serving area with 2,000 homes, at 50% penetration, times 1 Mbps, guess what? That’s a Gig. Which is pretty much 25 DOCSIS channels. If that goes to 2 Gigs, that’s 50 DOCSIS channels. We have 100. That’s why we spend a lot of time on this.

DEEP DIVE ON DOCSIS

MCN:DOCSIS 3.1: Status report please, for DOCSIS 3.1-based deployments — CPE [customer premises equipment] and CMTS [cable modem termination systems]? Anything notably different from prior DOCSIS upgrades?

Kotay: We’ve launched D3.1 service in Atlanta, Nashville and Chicago, with more coming this year and next. We think our XB6 is the next big vision of connectivity, with DOCSIS 3.1 at the heart of it.

Nair: Short version is, we’re in market and nearly done with CMTS. CPE begins next year.

Hart: We’ve got the 3.1 CMTS platforms up and running. We’ve got probably 50 different types of CPE that are working beautifully with the CMTS. Most of those are 3.0, so we’re testing out the backwards compatibility.

It will be similar in many respects to DOCSIS upgrades in the past, but with the introduction of OFDM [Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation], there will be a little bit of navigation in terms of the complexity. But we’re feeling pretty good about it and the early results are very solid.

MCN:Advanced Class question: Full-Duplex DOCSIS, or fiber-deeper? Or both?

Hart: It’s both, and from our perspective it’s fiber-deeper first. To enable concurrency on 3.1, we’ll continue to take fiber deeper and then get the full benefit of Full Duplex, depending on the service group size in any given market.

The other component is the remote PHY [initiative] as part of the fiber-deeper strategy and moving those electronics closer to the customer. That provides additional optionality to upgrade to Full Duplex and it also provides more optionality in the future potentially for some wireless [technology] in the remote cabinet if need be.

Kotay: We don’t look at these sorts of technologies as competing with one another as much as we see them as increasingly powerful tools in an increasingly large toolbox. Today, we’re offering Gigabit Pro, a 2-Gig symmetrical fiber-to-the-home service across our footprint, as well as D3.1-powered gigabit service in several markets, with more to come. For green-field development and MDUs [multiple dwelling units], fiber is often the best tool, but DOCSIS 3.1 and the forthcoming Full Duplex provide great flexibility to deliver gigabit speeds using our HFC network.

Nair: It’s not an either-or situation. We like them both. We’ll do fiber — we’re doing fiber — where it makes sense and, as it turns out, it makes sense in lots of places for us. Full Duplex DOCSIS means building for symmetrical bandwidth. Symmetrical DOCSIS is more a question of “when” than “if.” That’s because right now, we’re still delivering much more traffic to homes than from them — it’s asymmetrical. Going to node+0 (amplifiers) aligns us all for Full Duplex DOCSIS. So, whether it’s customer-generated content or the next OTT-like thing, it means we don’t have to swap out that last bit of coax.

MCN:4K, UltraHD, High Dynamic Range/HDR, wide-color gamut, 10-bit interleaving: What of all of this matters to you? How is it best harnessed to improve the life of people watching TV?

Nair: Of that list, HDR is more impactful than just “plain” 4K. However, only 4K televisions have HDR, so they’re kind of inter-linked in that way. We’re launching HDR as something that comes with our 4K service. It came out in an earnings call as “EOS,” but that’s more of an internal project name — it’s cloud-based and will roll out in the U.K. first.

Kotay: We’ve done a lot of testing. You can see our view reflected in our product strategy. Short version is, all those things you listed are good things. There’s just nothing bad about increasing resolution and so on. But the ones we’re most focused on right now from a technical standpoint are HDR and wide color gamut.

We can show you some 1080p HDR video that looks better than 4K non-HDR. Do you remember when you first saw HD, next to a standard definition TV? It was, whoa, that’s much better. HDR is the same. You don’t realize you haven’t seen a blue sky on your TV until you’ve seen it in HDR.

Hart: To me, HEVC [High Efficiency Video Coding], the new video compression, that’s equally important. It’s really being able to move that content around no matter what flavor it is from an efficiency perspective to preserve some of the bandwidth. I think all of those — 4K, HDR, etc. — are going to be important. What the consumers want and what the manufacturers can provide will work itself out based on the content that’s produced. To me, the concern is how to transport all that information in the most efficient way.

BANDWIDTH TRENDS

MCN: It wouldn’t be a CTO conversation without talking bandwidth. What’s the latest in broadband usage trend lines? (E.g., is the growth of the growth still in decline? Are there patterns worth noting?)

Hart: CAGR [compound annual growth rate] on the downstream, in terms of utilization, is about 49% to 50%, and that’s what we continue to model in our investment plan. From an upstream standpoint, we’re probably in the 27%-28% range. We’ll probably see that move into 30% or so. With all of the cloud-hosted solutions and cloud-managed solutions, it puts a lot more pressure on the upstream.

Nair: We’re seeing peak speeds growing — and they’re growing logarithmically. That keeps our attention. The main driver now is still video. With video, we used to have very large bundles, with smaller content libraries. The world is going to smaller bundles, with larger libraries of content.

Kotay: We double our network capacity every 18 to 24 months on average, and that has remained relatively constant. We can realize some efficiencies by doing less over the backbone and driving more regionalization, but as long as consumers’ demand for rich, powerful online and video experiences continues to grow, and the quality of those experiences continues to improve, we know we need to stay one step ahead of what’s next.

MCN:At what point is entertainment video not the bulkiest passenger on broadband? What other bandwidth-insatiable things on the horizon have your full attention?

Hart: We’ve always been a leader with business services; Cox Business is going to hit the $2 billion revenue mark this year. I think there will be some additional applications and managed services, hosted solutions that will start to eat a lot of bandwidth but deliver a lot of value.

Maybe perhaps longer-term, there’s virtual and augmented reality — those could be a huge driver if they take off.

Kotay: I think the Internet is experiencing a lot more social video as a form of communication. This includes things like Facebook Live, Periscope, Vine, quick clips. I think we’re still pretty far from video not being the bulkiest thing we carry, but we are seeing a rise in other forms. The good news is that compression improvements can help offset that.

Other things we’re seeing, with the preponderance of smartphones and devices, are more firmware updates. They’re bursty, but they can be materially significant. When a new game launches, that can be a big, bursty thing. Video is more consistent. It’s bulkier, yes, but more consistent and predictable.

So if you look at downloads, entertainment video will be a huge chunk for the next few years. However, as far as peak demand, we’ll likely see a continued rise in firmware updates and games — things happening in the background.

MCN:What’s the situation around the possibility of widening the spectrum above 1.2 GHz? Is it time to raise the roof around here?

Hart: I think in the near-term we’re in good shape without having to widen. It’s something we’re always evaluating and reviewing. If you’re going to be making some enhancements to the network, it makes good sense to try to future-proof it, but probably not here in the near term on that particular component.

MCN:Widening the upstream path: How do you think through when it’s time to do so? What’s the situation now?

Hart: The good news is that a fiber deep strategy helps to address some of the upstream bandwidth by decreasing the service group size. That’s going to buy us a little more runway than we had thought when considering mid-splits and high-splits options.

For now, we’re in pretty good shape with our strategy. With the mid-split maneuver, you’ve got a massive CPE implication; that’s where a ton of costs could be. I think we’re in pretty good shape today with our N+O strategy.

IN THE HOME

MCN:RDK, the Reference Design Kit, has a new profile: Broadband. What should people know about it?

Nair: The RDK started with video. The RDK is expanding, so it got segmented to “RDK-V.” The next one is focused on broadband, which is why you hear about “RDKB.” It’s a little tricky because the letters “V” and “B” sound very similar when spoken!

Regardless, RDK-V is how we got to a user experience that satisfies, on many levels. Comcast started it with X1. We’re onboard, so is Cox, Shaw [Communications] and a growing global footprint. RDK, no matter the letter behind it, is the for-real open source platform behind the platform.

RDK-B reinforces connectivity being king. Everything we deploy will be RDK.

Hart: I think RDK-B has a lot of the same promise [as RDK’s video profile] in terms of speed to market, good economics in terms of the open source and keeping it open to multiple vendors.

The other piece is the functionality and capability to do remote installation and monitoring and repairs, and some of the tools … will be a differentiator. And with the new tools coming out, ease of use is another big benefit of RDK-B.

Kotay: It’s this — broadband is a two-way network, but as an industry we’ve been relatively blind to the connectivity in the home. The feature sets for routers and broadband devices have been relatively static for 10, 15 years.

It’s analogous to video services, in a way: It used to be all about channels. Channels are still important, but there’s a lot more to it. Same thing for broadband: It used to be all about speed. Speed will continue to be important, but it becomes more than just that.

Things like RDK-B will be central to be able to understanding what’s going on, and responding to that understanding. Whole-home WiFi is a good example: It’s about putting a lot more visibility and tools into the hands of our customers.

MCN:Kevin, give us an update on where Cox is with the RDK video profile [Cox’s new Contour platform uses the RDK and syndicates Comcast’s X1 platform]. Any shareable Net Promoter Score or other metrics or anecdotes? In NPS parlance: Would you recommend it to a friend?

Hart: It’s been a huge success for us. We’re, of course, partnered with Tony [Werner, president, technology and product at Comcast] and his team. But it’s also what we’ve done to enable it for ourselves. We probably did two to three times the amount of integration work on this.

It’s definitely been a home run. In the first couple of months, we’ve already [surpassed] 400,000 subscribers. We’re moving quite rapidly in terms of our deployment relevant to our initial plans and expectations. And the customer feedback has been off the charts. The NPS is multiples in terms of some of the other legacy platforms that we have.

The ease-of-use has had a nice halo effect, much like G1GABLAST had for our Internet service. Within just a few months, we’ve been able to achieve the same overall level of performance of the platform around tuning, etc., that it took Comcast and many others many years to achieve. We get some of the benefits of their learnings, but we’ve been able to do that within our ecosystem.

MCN:What’s your approach to devices — those you provide and those customers bring and attach to you?

Kotay: If you went back four, five years — that’s when we started looking at having to build software and apps as more of an opportunity than a burden. Over the past two or three years, we’ve had the same shift with hardware. In our industry it used to be, oh, we have to provide a box, to do conditional access and some navigation, and we have to provide a cable modem, to do HSD [high-speed data].

It reminds me of [astronaut] Alan Shepard, when he was sitting in the spaceship, ready to take off, and was asked what he was thinking. He said he was thinking about “the fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”

The funny part was, while we were thinking that way, a lot of innovative companies were devoting a lot of effort to getting devices into the living room where we already had a foothold. I think it made all of us sit up and say: What if it’s not just about having product for an ISP or a cable provider? What if it’s about making the best product, period?

In the last couple of years, we’ve gotten a lot of religion about that and we’re seeing the rewards, in terms of customer satisfaction and retention with products like X1 and our X1 voice remote. Over the next year, you’ll see us continuing along that path with products like our Xi5 wireless set-top box and XB6 home gateway. The goal is simple: make products people love.

OUTSIDE OF THE HOME

MCN:How do you answer this question when your bosses ask it: What does 5G mean to us?

Nair: It means highly distributed, small cells with a mix of licensed and unlicensed spectrum. In some ways, it’s a credible threat. In other ways, it’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity because it’s coming out of mobile and all those small cells will need backhaul. We do backhaul. Ultimately, it’s a hype bubble at the moment — we think it’s more of a 2020 thing.

Hart: As you know, the majority of wireless traffic is facilitated by wireline, so there’s a lot of backhaul opportunities for us to partner with our carrier customers. As that becomes more prevalent and that becomes more pervasive, they’re going to need to leverage networks like ours and others in the MSO community.

As it related to leveraging it as a last couple of hundred of feet fixed wireless methodology, we’ll have the same opportunity to take advantage of that, particularly with some of the remote PHY components. We could potentially leverage some of that infrastructure with strand-mounted small cells as well.

There’s definitely a place for 5G and we think it’s both an opportunity that can help with the backhaul but also even potentially leverage ourselves. And we feel that the product that we already deliver is very competitive and will continue to stay ahead of the performance from a throughput and speed and connectivity standpoint.

MCN:Enterprise services: What’s the hot seller to commercial businesses right now? What does it take to go after the large enterprise crowd — to roll up the sleeves against Verizon and AT&T and the like?

Hart: We still have plenty of opportunity within the small-to-medium businesses within our footprint, so we’re continuing to stay focused there. Our IP Centrex hosted voice solutions are selling great right now. We’ve also got great opportunity with schools, government, our hospitality network and convention centers, and we’re looking to go a bit further upmarket over time. In many cases, there are probably opportunities to partner with other MSOs, because many of those larger enterprises span multiple geographies, sometimes not always directly within our footprint.

Kotay: Business services is a major and growing segment for us, and a focus for a lot of really cool innovation on the product side. As just one example that I’m excited about, we’ve been putting a lot of effort behind cloud enablement. Mid-market and enterprise customers, in particular, need bandwidth and solutions engineered to enable their move to cloud services.

Earlier this year, Comcast Business announced that it is providing businesses with direct connectivity to Amazon Web Services, which, as we all know, is one of the leading providers of cloud services in the world. As that group continues to move upstream and serve large, national enterprises with dispersed office locations and data centers, you’ll continue to see them make more news with major cloud providers.

Nair: It depends on the size of the business. In general, small and medium businesses are really interested in a high-quality, dedicated IP interface, in the range of 500 Megabits per second to a Gig. It goes on from there to hosted voice, layer 3 VPN, and eventually to an SDN-type solution.

IN THE CLOUD

MCN:What are the important elements in building a video cloud — dos and don’ts? Where is each of your respective companies, with respect to a cloud-based video offering?

Nair: I’ll go with “do” rather than ”don’t.” Do pick the right vendor. Two, make sure the vendor isn’t bullshitting you. Third, do make sure the vendor delivers.

Our path to cloud-DVR started with putting the navigation in the cloud. Then we put VOD in the cloud. Third is putting DVR in the cloud. That’s the progression that’s worked for us.

MCN:Kevin, you have options for the new Contour. Any plans underway to enable a cloud DVR service?

Hart: It’s on our product roadmap for next year. That being said, there’s been some mixed results in terms of customer uptake on the platform. Some of the things we’re working our way through are the content and the copyright components with some of the content providers. We’re still trying to work some of those models out.

The other piece is the economics. Setting up our own specific cloud DVR solution, the economics would be a little steep. We’re looking at a couple of different partners to provide some flexibility there. Some of the economic models from Cisco [Systems] and some other providers are becoming a little bit more nimble, agile and affordable and more “by the drink,” if you will. I think there will be some advances … that will allow us to make more progress on it. We’re evaluating it.

MCN:Where are you with virtualization, generally or specifically?

Kotay: I think virtualization has gotten fetishized. It’s not an answer to all problems. It’s a critical tool in the toolbox, yes. But, for example, some of the stuff we’re doing around containers isn’t virtualized, because they don’t need to be. There’s no elasticity in that workload, so, the less layers and complexity, the better.

Virtualization is important, and we need it in some areas, but it’s not the only tool. Of course, in some areas, virtualization technologies can deliver powerful benefits in terms of network performance and reliability. We’ve been pushing more programmability into the network for years, and have seen the benefit of that approach.

Hart: We are making a lot of progress on our virtualization plan, virtualizing from a hardware and software perspective and software-as-a-service and becoming much more nimble in terms of the things we do on a cloud-based way in which we leverage technology and leverage our products and services.

Nair: At a core level, we’re looking at SDN [software-defined networking] and NFV [network functions virtualization]. Both have significant and practical benefits. Benefits like providing dynamic bandwidth: clearly important. What comes with that tends to be economic and efficiency gains. That said, we do understand the challenges virtualization poses to our key vendors.

MCN:DevOps — What is it, why does it matter, and to what extent are your companies pursuing it?

Hart: We were working some DevOps opportunities last year, but we kind of went all-in earlier this year. We did a bit of an organizational realignment to create a true DevOps team that combined all of the development and IT operations team, and co-located a lot of our business stakeholders.

The speed-to-market, the learning, the quality, the feedback we’re getting from our stakeholders has exceeded my expectations in terms of the way our teams have embraced it and what they’ve learned from their counterparts that are now part of their same team members, and just the pace and scale and quality of what we’re delivering around multiple platforms. I actually thought there would be a bit more of a resistance, culturally, from the teams, but it’s been embraced.

We’re extending it not just to our traditional technology DevOps model, but we’ve had some major data center moves, so we’re applying DevOps methodologies to physical moves as opposed to just some of the virtual and technology development and making it more of a mindset in how we do business.

Kotay: We’re huge on it. There are two or three reasons why it matters. The biggest is, it creates the right culture of autonomy and accountability. Put another way, the people who cause the pain have to deal with the pain!

The rate of change is only increasing, so the whole idea of sequential handoffs — formally document your requirements, formally hand them off to the design group, which hands off to the engineering group, which does the test cases and hands it off to QA, then to integration and test, then to deployment, then to support — there was a time and a place when that made sense. There are still cases where it makes sense, actually — hardware work is still very much a “waterfall.”

But being there on the DevOps side, supporting the triage elements that come with RDK-B, and being deeply involved all the way through product and process … DevOps still blows my mind. It changes everything, with everything that means. We wouldn’t be where we are without it.

Nair: DevOps matters if you’ve adopted an agile software methodology, and you’re building a lot of your own code. In other words, if you’ve decided to own your stuff. If you choose to do your own build framework and you’re writing code — because you want transparency and control of whatever your situation is — then the model works.

CLOSING QUESTION

MCN:What disruptors or potential disruptors are on your radar right now?

Hart: For the disruptor component, it’s about keeping our eye around 5G in the fixed wireless space and how do we capitalize on that emerging technology, particularly around MDUs and commercial businesses?

It’s not very glamorous, but regarding special projects, it’s about working on process excellence and customer experience and putting the right set of tools and customer self-care and navigational flows within our call center and field services. It’s a lot of process work, but we’ve got to codify that within some of our technology tools. It can help to distinguish ourselves and continue to separate from some competitors.

Kotay: I’ll take “potential disruptors,” in the context of the Internet of Things. I find it interesting that at this point in 2016, IoT [the Internet of things] still has so much headroom to grow. And that growth, when it accelerates, will create interesting dynamics.

If you think about the connectivity axis and look at power consumption, bandwidth and range, there’s an interesting gap. For lack of a better term, call it the narrowband space, for instance. It creates an environment for things with aren’t hard on batteries and very long range, in terms of miles. Their bandwidth requirements are medium at best, like for M2M [machine-to-machine communications]. I don’t know if it’s disruptive, but it feels like there’s something interesting there.

Another I’m still constantly watching are display surfaces. They’re also ripe for disruption, more in the five-to-eight-year horizon. I don’t know if it’s flexible displays or cheaper displays, but it feels like we’ll have a lot more screens in our lives, and not just mobile. Fixed screens too.

Nair: I’ll take disruptors. Primarily, disruptors really are those competitors who aren’t interested in profitability — for five-plus years. That’s a long time.

TBS talk show host Conan O’Brien, a pioneer in social media and online video, surpassed 2 billion views on his Team Coco You Tube channel, with fans clocking in more than 6.2 billion minutes of viewing time.

The channel features clips from current and past episodes of TBS’ CONAN, in addition to online-exclusive music and comedy. The You Tube channel has about 3.5 million subscribers.

Among that content is "Ice Cube, Kevin Hart and Conan Help a Student Driver" a segment that has generated about 26 million video views on YouTube and the Team Coco website since debuting Jan. 5, making it the most watched clip in the history of CONAN on TBS. The remote features the stars of Universal Pictures' Ride Along 2, Ice Cube and Kevin Hart.

CONAN airs Monday-Thursday at 11 p.m. (ET/PT) on TBS. The show is produced by Conaco LLC, with Jeff Ross serving as executive producer.

In these days of hyper-competition on all fronts of the multichannel-TV industry, technology truly rules. Bigger broadband, better video, more mobility and continuous improvement are key. Only the strong will survive. Ahead of the annual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, Multichannel News technology analyst Leslie Ellis checked in with three top chief technology officers — Cox Communications’s Kevin Hart, Liberty Global’s Balan Nair and Comcast’s Tony Werner — on such timely topics as industry consolidation, capacity expansion and what it takes to move at “Web speed,” like cable’s new over-the-top competitors. They also drilled into chewy tech trends like wireless and LTE-Unlicensed, the “Gigabuzz-o-rama,” the Reference Design Kit (RDK) and, of course, DOCSIS 3.1. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: Merger-itaville! Consolidation is happening in a very big way this year. To what extent is it impacting your technical and engineering life/work?

Kevin Hart: Navigating the shifting waters around our vendor-supplier ecosystems — that probably has me thinking a little longer. In the short term, there can be implications: Perhaps they lose focus on product support or on backing up programs that are in place. As we continue to say, Cox is not for sale. But there are definite implications on how we think and operate. You’ll see additional partnering opportunities that we’ll pursue to leverage scale from a product standpoint.

Balan Nair: Scale is important in our business. We need it to be competitive; it brings great opportunities in our ability to do big things. Remember, we’re up against companies with global reach, with much larger balance sheets. Innovation and keeping up in product development and consumer behavioral changes are getting more complicated and more capital-intensive.

MCN: A lot of good stuff is happening behind the scenes these days that’s all about finding and fixing problems before they reach customers. What’s your favorite customer-care tool these days?

KH: We have multiple roadmaps around this. One example is a tool where we’ve leveraged Agile [methodologies] — Home View. It’s an internal tool, currently, that lets us see the performance and QoS [quality of service] of set-top boxes, modems and end devices within the home. From that, we can provide better self-care by feeding some aspects of the internal Home View app into [subscribers’] “My Account” view, or enable a proactive reset, or a fine-tune or software upgrades. We’re starting to deploy it. It will really help us to improve the user experience and mitigate both calls and truck rolls.

BN: I’m with Kevin.

Tony Werner: We’ve made transforming the customer experience a focus throughout the company, so it would be impossible to briefly summarize everything we’re doing. That said, I’m really excited about the continued evolution of our “My Account” app, which gives our customers pinpoint control over their accounts, and greatly reduces the need for calls and even service visits. What’s great about the app is that it’s an app — and like any app, we can continually update and expand it. One of the features we recently debuted, and are launching nationwide in the next few months, is our Tech ETA feature. It lets people see where their service technician is, en route, on an interactive map — similar to what folks have come to expect with online car services.

MCN: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon — they’re all companies that grew up on broadband, and as such are natively “agile” and “DevOps.” What’s the status of those Web-side development concepts in your organizations?

BN: Yes, we have to work faster. Unquestionably, DevOps and all the other related buzzwords are important and happening.

TW: Agile and DevOps are both very real to us, and really form the foundation of the innovative product development model we’ve adopted over the past five years. We work those development concepts every day, whether in the form of fast-paced product-development “sprints” or cross-functional tiger teams that bring together design, engineering and product experts in lean, fast-moving leadership groups. I think our commitment to those development principles stands with the very best of Silicon Valley, and is evidenced in a product like [cloud-based video platform] X1, which is updated at Web speed and frequency in a way that delivers new products and services. Xfinity Games and Xfinity Share are just two that we unveiled this past calendar year.

KH: We too have really leaned in on those particular practices to put them into operation over the last year and a half. We’ve rolled out the agile methodology, and we’re seeing great returns. Our “target state” website, which is the internal name of our e-commerce program — that’s agile. Sprint after sprint, we’re adding new capabilities, based on real customer feedback.

As for DevOps, earlier this year I moved to an integrated organizational structure around DevOps, and combining Tier 1 and Tier 2 [resources]. For video, voice and high-speed data, I co-located the development and operations teams around those platforms, with one, single end-to-end owner.

MCN: Was it painful?

KH: To be honest, I was concerned about the organization’s ability to adapt to the new model. So I was pleasantly surprised to see how pleased our people have been. The co-location, the structure, the tools — every one wants to deliver better services. That’s the goal, and we’re doing that. But to your point, some of the tools and techniques to integrate DevOps into the daily norm are still coming along.

BN: But it will be more painful to ignore this shift!

MCN: What does it take to be technologically competitive in these times?

KH: Great question. I’ve been here four and a half years or so. The rate of change within the MSO space, from a technology perspective, is now on par with the technological competitive landscape. It wasn’t always that way. We’re now competing against some of the largest technology players on the face of the Earth. We need to continuously improve our feedback loops, evaluate trends and architect platforms. And we have to do that in tight sync with our chief marketing and chief product officers and their teams.

TW: First and foremost, it requires a will to innovate, which in turn requires a willingness to disrupt your own processes and preconceptions. A product like X1 exists because a small team here started with a basic premise — “We can make this better.” It’s an ethos that I’m committed to cultivating throughout our product-development process. When you start from a position of wanting to constantly improve and build better mousetraps, the rest is just effort and execution.

BN: It takes amazing luck, forecasting of technology trends, understanding what Apple and Google are doing — and being able to predict what they are going to do. And allocating resources to the right projects. And on and on!

MCN: On to some nitty-gritty tech issues. WiFi and LTE-U/LAA: It has the potential to seriously disrupt WiFi connectivity. On a scale of 1-10 — where 1 is, “Relax, everything’s going to be OK,” and 10 is “battle stations, brace for impact!” — where are you?

KH: Up until recently, I was closer to the 8-9 range, because of the uncertainties about how the process is unfolding. Now, I’m trending toward a 6 or 7. We’re hanging our hat on LAA [Licensed Assisted Access], the international standard. We think it’s more WiFi-friendly. There are also some tailwinds around [Qualcomm’s] muLTEfire [wireless-broadband] approach. It’s more equal — it enables us to have a bit more of a level playing field, as it relates to the control plane of the unlicensed band.

BN: I give it a 5 — it’s as much an opportunity as it is a disruption. LTE-U is going to happen. We have to figure ways to make it effective for us. It’s in the unlicensed band, so we can participate in it as well. The control plane should be in the unlicensed band, too.

MCN: One day, CableLabs tests cite a definite and deleterious impact of LTE-U on WiFi; the next day, other tests indicate no impact. What are the indicators of truth?

BN: Anytime you have different PHYs [physical layers] operating in the same spectrum, it can be a problem. CableLabs is doing a great job for us, to move it from “problem” to “opportunity.”

KH: I also think there’s a definite correlation involving the physical distance between the WiFi access point and the LTE tower. At 300 meters or so, there’s little impact on throughput. At 20 meters, you can have almost a 100% reduction in the output. So a lot of it is correlated to distance, but the standards will help.

MCN: IP video: Where are you with it, and when will your networks be “all-IP?”

BN: Our strategy is to first move the user interface, then VOD, then linear, to IP. The UI and VOD shifts are in full swing. Linear has started with our Horizon Go service, but not yet to legacy set-tops. We’ll probably start down that path in 2017.

TW: We’ve spent significant time and resources on this. Great progress so far. That said, our industry still has a good deal of work ahead before we realize the all-IP video future. Ingesting all of the assets and local channel lineups is a small part of the overall effort. Operationalizing, building all of the tools, implementing alternate content switching — it’ll take some time.

KH: All of our video distribution to second screens is IP-enabled, as is all of our VOD ecosystem. We’re about to complete the first year of a two-year plan to go all-digital. That’ll free up enough spectrum to enable our [DOCSIS] 3.1 plans. When that’s complete, at the end of ’16, we’ll follow our IP roadmap. It’ll likely take us three-plus years before we’re all-IP, but we’re on our way.

MCN: What’s the faster and more efficient way to sustainable bandwidth and capacity: DOCSIS 3.1, or fiber-deep and PON [Passive Optical Network]?

TW: Hands down, DOCSIS 3.1. With 3.1, we’re backward-compatible. Devices can be self-installed. No backhoes. Any network improvements we make in addition to DOCSIS 3.1 will only serve to enhance its capacity to deliver superfast Internet to our customers.

BN: Agree. DOCSIS 3.1 is the most efficient way; that’s a no brainer. Taking fiber deeper is definitely an option for rebuilds and upgrades. Fiber to the home [FTTH] makes sense for most new builds. Depending on the situation, we have many tools in our tool bag. D3.1 is the most cost-efficient.

KH: With our “G1GABLAST” product, which we launched about a year ago, we’ve been extending fiber deeper — all the way to the home or [multiple dwelling unit]. We’ve had pretty good success around that. It’ll still be a hybrid of both technologies [DOCSIS 3.1 and fiber-deep].

MCN: What’s the state of the state of DOCSIS 3.1? How and when does it “go to market?”

KH: What we’re hearing throughout the ecosystem is very encouraging, in terms of the speeds, spectral efficiencies, backward-compatibility to DOCSIS 3.0 and overall interoperability. I think you’ll start to see market trials and production networks in ’16. We’ll probably be late ’16 or early ’17, as we finalize the all-digital spectrum reclamation. DOCSIS 3.1 will be a key tool in the toolkit to enable Gigabit services in our broader footprint — it has a very long life ahead of it.

BN: We’re already deploying CCAP [Converged Cable Access Platform] with D3.1 capability on both the downstream and the upstream signal directions. We’ll issue a request for proposals on consumer premises equipment [CPE] later this year, with selections early next year. Deployment will be end of 2016, early 2017, depending on how long it takes to certify and trial the new devices with a new chipset.

MCN: Will it evolve like the prior versions of DOCSIS — modems and gateways first, then headend gear and CMTS [cable modem termination system]?

KH: Yes, I think that’s the expected sequence of events. I think the CPE in general is a little behind the curve, but over the next few months you’ll see changes there.

BN: Ditto.

MCN: Gigabit services: All the rage! And then there’s the reality of it: The fastest tiers are invariably the lowest subscribed. Is it a necessity or a red herring?

BN: You know, there’s lots of smoke and mirrors with Gigabit services. Our bull’s-eye product offering now is 150 Megabits per second. That’s plenty competitive, and it’s doing quite well. Gigabit is still a niche product, but I think it’ll be mainstream in about three years — mainstream for us, anyway. Our cost to get to Gigabit will be an order of magnitude less than a telco deployment, on a cost-per-passing basis.

KH: We rolled out our G1GABLAST service about a year ago, so we’re slightly ahead of the curve on that one. We’ve had a good take rate where it’s available, but not everybody needs a Gig today. As we evolve it, it will continue to gain traction. More importantly, we doubled our speeds this year on our most popular tiers, across our entire footprint. Our focus is trying to make sure we’re delivering high-quality speed, with minimized constraints, to the majority of our footprint.

MCN: What should this audience know about speed vs. throughput? KH: Speed is one thing. Concurrency of devices is another. It’s a function of the weakest link in the chain. If the WiFi router or gateway isn’t 802.11ac, speeds are going to drop — even if there’s a Gig coming into the house.

TW: Very few things need a burst rate of more than 4 to 10 Mbps, but multiple devices at low speeds do accumulate to higher traffic. We’re always engineering our networks for both burst rate and throughput. Ultimately, all of the attention around Gigabit is a very good thing for the industry and for consumers, because it drives us all to stay well ahead of the curve as we engineer the access networks of tomorrow.

MCN: The upstream path: To widen, or not to widen? If widen — when, how much and how?

BN: Upstream is important, but not as important as downstream. We are mostly a society of consumers, not publishers. So far, anyway.

KH: I think the reality of applications and the leveraging of the cloud are just putting more pressure on the upstream. We’ve seen a couple percentage points of upstream growth, year over year. Bonded channels are an option; moving the upper boundary of the upstream [from 42 MHz] is also an option. There are definitely some levers for us to pull, particularly as we take fiber deeper.

TW: The nice thing about DOCSIS 3.1 is that it allows for a higher [spectrum] split, all the way up to 204 MHz. I think we will take advantage of this in certain places. I don’t think it is absolutely required, but we have the tools.

MCN: To what extent is the RDK a part of your or your company’s day-to-day technology work?

KH: Tony and Balan are farther down the RDK path. As we leverage the X1 platform to be the user interface of our Contour 2 app, we’re moving to RDK as a part of our home architecture system. So we’ll be doing more with RDK in the future, with our video products. Also, as we continue to improve our in-home WiFi presence, we’ll be looking at RDK-B for our in-home gateway and architectural designs.

TW: I think the same advantages that we have obtained in RDK-V [for video] will be evident in RDK-B — meaning the power of a community, and the significantly faster time-to-market for new technology, and the faster release of features. Same story for both.

BN: I challenge all the other cable companies to really adopt this. RDK-V and RDK-B [broadband] are a big part of our future development. We need scale in our collective development — that way, we can drive some amazing things, together, with a common underlying stack. RDK has all of the relevant checkboxes: Open source, cloud, scale, embedded in most chips, expertise in our development community, vendor support — it leaves no reason to want to go do your own thing.

MCN: Anything in particular you’re on the lookout for at this week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo?

KH: I’m looking forward to seeing some of the great advances in energy conservation and disaster recovery. Cox is making several good advances in both categories, and we’ll have a few demos onsite in New Orleans. Tell your readers to check it out.

BN: Agree again with Kevin, sans the demos. As the co-chair of the Energy2020 program, I can attest — it’s big, it matters, and everybody should know more about it.

TW: Distributed access architecture — products and technologies.

Comcast spokesman John Demming said thousands of employees across the country sported bow ties beginning not long after his death, including for an internal memorial service and celebration on June 25 that was broadcast to employees and included pictures, remembrances and remarks by Roberts’s son Brian Roberts, the company’s chairman and CEO.

Demming said that the viral bow tie salute included technicians wearing ties on service calls. And it was not confined to ties, with bow-tie earrings and necklaces and bracelets also making appearances among the staffers. No word on whether bow-tie pasta was served at Ralph’s Café, which is the name of the employee cafeteria at the company’s Philadelphia headquarters.

Demming, who tweeted his own bow-tied selfie on June 25, called the employee celebration “amazing” and “a wonderful day for a wonderful man.”

— John Eggerton

How Cox’s Hart, Family Became World Cup Stars

How did Kevin Hart, the Cox Communications chief technology officer, and his daughters end up becoming iconic fans of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team’s victory in the recent Women’s World Cup?

It starts with their love of soccer, Cox officials said after the team’s Twitter account (@ussoccer_ wnt) tweeted this photo of a pumped-up Hart and his 12- and 9-year-old daughters.

Hart was a four-year starter, captain and most valuable player on Tulsa’s Division 1 Soccer Team, Cox communications ace Todd Smith tells The Wire. He was also first-team All America for the Midwest region, and his team set a NCAA D1 record for most consecutive home wins, at 39 in a row.

This year, he coached his daughters to two Disney 3v3 National Soccer Tournament Championships in January and took them both to the Women’s World Cup final game in Vancouver, Canada, on July 5 (won by the U.S. team, 5-2, over Japan). While there, the Harts gave their best “Go USA” pose at a promotional photo booth and the team, understandably, endorsed it with a tweet.

In Susan Eid’s Name, Efforts to Raise Funds to Combat Cancer

DirecTV’s former top government and legal affairs executive, Susan Eid, who died on Nov. 27 after a battle with cancer, was remembered at the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association annual convention in Newport, R.I., as a smart, funny, gracious and graceful woman who was not afraid of a fight.

Now, her sister Cindy is taking up her battle, trying to raise $2 million for cancer research.

Eid got her start in cable 25 years ago with Continental Cablevision. She later oversaw Media One Group’s Washington, D.C., office and served as senior public policy adviser to George W. Bush-era Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell. She joined Hughes Electronics (DirecTV’s former parent) in 2004 and led its Washington efforts as senior vice president of government and regulatory affairs.

In a brief tribute to Eid, NECTA convention committee chairman and Comcast senior vice president, government & regulatory relations Mark Reilly said that while she probably wouldn’t have wanted the attention, she remained optimistic throughout her battle with cancer, supporting Massachusetts General Hospital’s cancer research financially and volunteering for experimental treatments. He said Eid also donated her own tissue to Mass General’s research efforts after her death, which has helped researchers learn new ways to more effectively battle Susan’s type of cancer.

“Cindy is now going to take on Susan’s fight from here,” Reilly said.

Donations can be made in Susan’s name online or by mail by putting “Susan Eid” on the memo line and writing to: Massachusetts General Hospital, Breast Cancer Research, 100 Cambridge St., Suite 1300, Boston, MA 02114.

— Mike Farrell

Kevin Hart, Snoop Dog and Zendaya will lead a list of celebrities set to appear on the new season of MTV2’s Nick Cannon Presents: Wild ‘N’ Out, the network announced Thursday.

The seventh season of the comedy improv/competition series will debut June 10 with two episodes, said MTV2. Along with the aforementioned celebrities, the list of guests and performers scheduled to appear during the new season include Jordin Sparks, Ne-Yo, Shaquille O'Neal, Fabolous, Pete Wentz, Fetty Wap, T-Pain, A$AP Ferg, Nick Young, French Montana, Fat Joe, Rae Sremmurd, Ty Dolla $ign, Migos, Mack Wilds, DJ Drama, Ray J, Lil Duval, O.T. Genasis, Tommy “Tiny” Lister, Dej Loaf, K Camp and the hosts of Power 105’s The Breakfast Club, said the network.

In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Wild N Out will launch #BestofWNO, a social voting competition across several platforms to determine fans’ favorite moments from the first six seasons of the show, said the network.  

Over-the-top video streaming service Crackle will launch a new season of its hit series Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee on Nov. 6, the service said Friday.

Celebrities set to converse with series host/creator Jerry Seinfeld during the fifth season of the Emmy-nominated series include Fred Armisen (Portlandia),Colleen Ballinge (Hipsterhood),Bill Burr(Walk Of Shame),Jimmy Fallon (The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon),Kevin Hart (Think Like A Man Too), Amy Schumer (Inside Amy Schumer)  and Ali Wentworth (In Living Color).

Previous episodes of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee currently running on Crackle have featured such comedy legends as Jason Alexander, Aziz Ansari, Alec Baldwin, Mel Brooks, Louis CK, Larry David, Tina Fey, Ricky Gervais, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Seth Meyers, Howard Stern and Jon Stewart, among others, said company officials.

Cox Communications is getting ready to up the ante on multiple service fronts, with a particular emphasis on broadband and video. On the high-speed end, it’s already moving ahead on a plan to bring 1-Gigabit capabilities to all customers in the coming years while also weighing the path forward on a next-generation video platform. Cox will also be looking to free up precious spectrum for DOCSIS 3.1 and other services via an ambitious all-digital transition that will soon be in full swing. 

Kevin Hart, Cox’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, recently talked with Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner about the MSO’s top priorities and an update on its key tech projects. An edited transcript follows.

SCTE DAILY: What are your top priorities for the rest of 2013 and into the start of 2014?

KH: No. 1 is our continued network transformation. We’re in the process of doubling our speeds across our footprint this year, up to 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps for our two most popular tiers. We’re also in the process of launching our Gigabit service.

No. 2 is our all-digital project — not only network readiness, but the full back office and the customer experience. There’s lots of good preparation around that with the launch coming up in the fourth quarter.

No. 3 is our future-state video, as we think about the future platform for our video framework and our transition to IP. We have two or three different trials going on around our future-state video platform.

Fourth is the enablement of Cox Business commercial sector. We’re getting very close to launching some of our new sales workflow enablement capabilities for Cox Business.

SCTE DAILY: Can you offer more detail on your future-state video platform?

KH: We’ve been very pleased with the launch of Contour — primary screen, secondary screen, the storage on the set-top box, etc. — and now we’re thinking about, what’s the next generation of that solution? We’re got a couple of things going on internally that we’ve looked at from our own development and we’re also looking at partnering with others across the industry around different trials. [Ed. note: In January, Comcast announced that it was in talks with Cox about licensing its X1 platform. At the time, Cox said X1 was one of the options it is assessing.]

SCTE DAILY: When do you expect to decide on a direction?

KH: We’re likely to have trials in the fourth quarter of this year and the first quarter of next year, [followed by] post-evaluation of different options, including some things we’re doing internally, as well as leveraging platforms like X1. We’ll make a decision on the path forward.

SCTE DAILY:For 1-Gig, you’ve already identified your initial markets — Phoenix, Las Vegas and Omaha, Neb. — for that effort. Can you get us up to speed on the progress as you look to begin market-wide deployment of Gigabit speeds by the end of 2016?

KH: This is a top priority for us at Cox. We’ve [introduced] some of our market-branding, “Gig Life,” promoting the service capability and the customer experience. We are on track for a fourth-quarter launch in Phoenix. It’s a combination of new greenfield facilities, both MDUs [multiple dwelling units] and residents within Phoenix, and also some overbuild for existing neighborhoods.

We’ve announced that Las Vegas and Omaha will follow and we haven’t announced exact time lines yet.

SCTE DAILY: In Phoenix for the overbuild component, are you looking at a fiber-to-the-home implementation, like a GPON?

KH: We’re definitely going to leverage both fiber-to-the-home as well as DOCSIS 3.1. With DOCSIS 3.1 not being market-ready yet, we will leverage solutions like GPON to enable Gigabit speeds, particularly in the greenfield builds, and particularly in the MDU [multiple dwelling unit] space.

SCTE DAILY:In Phoenix, how are you deciding where to roll out 1-Gig with fiber? Will it be everywhere or in specific parts of the network initially?

KH: Eventually, it will be everywhere, leveraging the DOCSIS 3.1 platform. Initially, based on marketing analysis and market demand, we have a Web site where we have customers signing up from a pre-registration standpoint. There are probably three or four different factors that are helping us shape the build curve.

We had huge early results in terms of customers signing up and kind of outpaced our expectations in terms of the numbers.

SCTE DAILY: Can you shed more light on Cox’s all-digital project?

KH: We’ve made a ton of progress since we talked last [in April 2014]. We’re on track for a fourth quarter market launch. We have several markets from a technical network perspective ready for the conversion. Now we’re doing our final stages of testing around the actual DTA [digital transport adapter] all-digital kits that will be sent to our customers’ homes. 

We’re on track for a fourth-quarter market launch and then we have … a very aggressive schedule to complete this in 2015 and 2016, with a very steady cadence throughout those two calendar years.

SCTE DAILY:4K and Ultra HD is still an emerging market, but where is it on Cox’s agenda?

KH: I would say it’s still an emerging piece of our products and service portfolio. I think we have the capabilities, but it’s still kind of early in the lifecycle from a consumer demand standpoint. But we are ready; it’s just timing from a market standpoint.

SCTE DAILY:What’s the status of your WiFi deployment? Is Cox considering a home-as-a-hotspot rollout in gateways deployed in customer home?

KH: We’ve been pleased with our metro WiFi deployments to date. We’ve announced that in addition to lighting up Omaha, we’re also going to light up Phoenix as part of our Gig Life rollout, and we’re currently doing a build now, and Las Vegas will follow. You’ll probably see more metro WiFi deployments in line with our Gig announcements.

We’re looking at the second SSID [service set identifier], particularly in our Cox Business footprint, and we’re still evaluating home-as-a-hotspot.