This year’s Technology Leadership Award honorees, selected by the editors of Broadcasting+Cable, have some of the most diverse résumés in the history of these awards, with careers in broadcast TV, cable, streaming, theatrical film production, research, venture capital and public media. 

For some, their work involves fundamental, cutting-edge research or the development of standards that are bringing new technologies to market. Others are using newer technologies like data analytics, cloud-based infrastructures or artificial intelligence to help traditional TV companies build new infrastructures for new digital and streaming businesses. Many of them have also pursued careers in more traditional media, where they’ve used their technological skills in broadcasting or content production in innovative ways that helped develop new consumer experiences and better video content.

Taken together, the honorees’ stories offer a snapshot of a technological revolution that is transforming virtually every aspect of the television industry. 

Many of them will speak about that tech revolution at this year’s Technology Leadership Series, from March 23-26. For more on the agendas and sessions, go to technologyleadershipsummit.com. 

Greig Fraser, Director of Photography/Producer, Disney Plus

One big reason why Greig Fraser is getting a Technology Leadership Award can be seen by simply firing up the Disney Plus app and watching The Mandalorian. 

Star Wars fans have come to expect lavish special effects that transport audiences all over the universe, but creating the beautiful otherworldly landscapes found in blockbuster movies presents a serious challenge for a television series like The Mandalorian, which must be produced on a much more limited budget.  

Working with teams at Industrial Light & Magic, the visual-effects company that creates the stunning imagery for the Star Wars franchise, Fraser came up with a much less costly solution to the problem, a new production system dubbed “The Volume.” 

The idea originated in 2015 during the production of theatrical film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. That film used a large LED (light-emitting diode) wall, which could display different backgrounds. to shoot a number of scenes. 

By the time shooting started on season one of The Mandalorian in 2018, improvements in LED walls, processing power and upgrades to Epic Games’s Unreal Engine 4 allowed producers to use a similar system to create spectacular visuals without leaving a Los Angeles warehouse. 

“We could create a background on the wall with the 3D gaming engine that a camera could shoot, and create realistic images,” Fraser explained. “It means you never have to build a set again. You just project it on a wall and it becomes real.” 

The effort earned Fraser and Baz Idoine a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series (Half-Hour) in 2020. But Fraser believes the potential goes far beyond beautiful images in The Mandalorian and science-fiction projects that rely heavily on special effects. “It started in science fiction and Star Wars, but I think it will become a mainstream drama based solution,” Fraser said. 

The Volume also cuts costs and simplifies the production process, which is often limited by weather, available light, logistics and other factors, he said. That means producers can pay more attention to storytelling, as opposed
to trying to quickly shoot a scene during the beautiful but fleeting dawn or dusk light. 

“I think it is a milestone, a turning point in filmmaking that will allow directors to come up with innovative ways to tell stories,” he said. 

Fraser’s work with ILM to create The Volume is the most recent highlight from an award-winning career as a director of photography, producer and cinematographer. He has worked on dozens of films, including Zero Dark Thirty, Lion, Rogue One and such upcoming films as The Batman, where The Volume will be used. 

Throughout his career, Fraser has always tried to use technology in ways that would help directors tell better stories.

“Everyone thinks that filmmaking always involves the perfect scenario,” Fraser said. “The sky is always blue and everything is perfect. But the reality is very different. Nature is very beautiful, but it can also be cruel. So my goal for filmmaking is to remove as many of the hindrances to filmmaking as possible so that technology helps, not hinders, the director.” 

William T. Hayes, Director of Engineering & Technology, Iowa Public Television

Like many Technology Leadership Award winners over the years, William Hayes got an early start in broadcasting, building an AM radio station at his high school with a few classmates. “We played music during lunch hour but the reality of it was that we wanted to be DJs, so we built a radio station to do that,” he said. 

Hayes pursued his dream of being a disc jockey while attending Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where his tech skills helped him to get work fixing things and as a DJ at the college radio station. 

“But I soon found that jocks get fired a lot,” Hayes recalled with a laugh. So, in the late 1970s, he decided to follow the advice of a colleague who praised his tech skills. 

“He said I ought to become an engineer,” he said. “You still get to work in a fun business but you don’t get fired anywhere as much.” 

Hayes made the switch to TV when he was hired in 1982 by Mauna Kea Broadcasting to construct the first full-powered UHF TV station in the Hawaiian islands. From there, he went on to a successful career in commercial broadcasting in the 1980s and 1990s, holding the top engineering jobs at a number of stations before taking his current job at Iowa PBS in 1999. 

At the nine-station Iowa PBS network, Hayes and his tech teams have been involved in a number of innovative projects. These include: a major digital TV transition with nine transmitter sites; acting as the host of an annual summit on the DTV transition; launching an all-HD facility in 2007, when many stations were still standard-definition; and, most recently, overseeing an innovative approach to installing a new automation system during a pandemic lockdown. 

Much of this illustrates the kind of innovation often found at public broadcasters that operate on limited budgets. “We don’t have a lot of money, but people are very mission-driven and good at finding ways to think outside the box to get things done,” he said. 

Hayes’s career also illustrates the kind of industry-wide collaboration that has characterized many Technology Leadership Award winners. Early in his career, Hayes saw the virtues of collaboration when he got help building his first TV station in Hawaii from colleagues like Doug Lung, another 2021 Technology Leadership Award winner, and the Harold Ennis books he’d gotten from the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE). 

Following that experience, he began to work closely with a number of major organizations, including the SBE; the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society, where he is a past president; and the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (SMPTE).

Cindy Hutter Cavell, VP, Cavell, Mertz and Associates

Early in her career, in 1981, Cindy Hutter Cavell remembers getting a call from her boss at ABC News telling her that she needed to be at Kennedy Airport the next afternoon, because they were flying her to Kathmandu, Nepal, where she would be building a series of microwave transmitters that ABC and Canada’s CBC would use to air the climbing of Mount Everest. 

That kind of engineering work, to capture amazing images from all over the world, highlights the kind of innovation that broadcast engineers have displayed for decades. It’s also an early example of the innovative work that has earned Hutter Cavell a place in the 2021 class of Technology Leadership Award winners. 

Hutter Cavell got an early start in technology, learning how to solder at the age of 10 and hosting a daily classical music program at her high-school radio station. 

After getting a journalism degree at the University of Kansas in 1977, she went to work in local TV before joining ABC News. Besides her adventures at Everest, her 15-year stint at ABC News saw her working on numerous presidential trips, three Olympics and Operation Desert Storm, where she was the on-site technical manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for U.S. Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s briefings in 1991. 

In 1993, Hutter Cavell returned to local broadcast, heading up engineering at a number of different stations being acquired by Argyle Television. As one of very few women to head a local station’s engineering staff, she did innovative work rebuilding a number of facilities, but her proudest memories come from training and working with local engineers. “I wanted to return to local TV because I wanted to grow operations and grow people,” she recalled. 

After overseeing a digital upgrade at a Fox Sports Net facility in Houston and then working for Digital Systems Technology, she was hired in 2004 by Sprint Nextel as director of engineering to oversee the $700 million 2-GHz relocation. This work had an important long-term impact on the industry because it allowed stations to move to newer digital microwaves and laid the groundwork for moving to IP microwave. 

She then joined Cavell, Mertz and has since been involved in a number of innovative projects, including building a series of microwave transmitters capable of transporting data from Chicago to New York faster than a fiber-optic network. Cindy and her husband, Garrison Cavell, have also been very active in working with the National Association of Broadcasters to train the next generation of engineers. 

“Media companies are complaining that they can’t find engineers,” Hutter Cavell said.
“My response is to say, ‘You need to put your money where your mouth is.’ If you have a chief engineer who is over 60, you had better start now training someone for that role.” 

Brett Jenkins, Executive VP/Chief Technology Officer, Nexstar Media Group

When Brett Jenkins earned his bachelor of science in electrical engineering at the University of Massachusetts in 1992, he remembers becoming fascinated with digital broadcasting and taking a job at Comark, a manufacturer of transmission technologies. 

“I thought digital broadcasting was the coolest thing ever,” Jenkins recalled. “It was television and it was digital and we could do things with digital technologies you couldn’t do before.” 

One of his first tasks at Comark was working on digital modulators and getting digital broadcasts to work, which led to a series of jobs at vendors that were developing cutting-edge technologies for digital broadcasting, including Thales and Thomson. Jenkins was the lead U.S. engineer in a global team developing digital adaptive pre-correction technology that earned Thales a technical Emmy in 2003. 

After getting an MBA in 2005 from the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, Jenkins moved to the broadcasting side of the business, taking a job with Ion Media in 2007 as director of technology strategy. “I wanted to move from not just developing technology to working at broadcasters on ways to connect technology to the business success of broadcasting,” he said. “That is still really my passion today.”

Jenkins was promoted to VP of technology at Ion in 2009 and then took the top engineering jobs at Lin Media in 2011 and Media General in 2014. After Nexstar acquired Media General, Jenkins was named executive VP and chief technology officer of Nexstar in 2017.

At Nexstar, the nation’s largest broadcaster, Jenkins has been working on a number of innovative technologies, including work on new standards for advanced advertising, finding better ways to produce local news and deployments of the next-generation broadcast standard ATSC 3.0. 

“We launched ATSC 3.0 in 12 markets in 2020 and another 20 markets might launch this year,” he explained, adding that by the end of the 2021 Nexstar stations broadcasting in ATSC 3.0 will reach about one-third of the country. 

Figuring out new business models for next-generation broadcasting is still a work in progress, but Jenkins sees opportunities in two major areas: first, using ATSC 3.0 to improve stations’ core businesses with higher quality video and interactivity; and second, developing new businesses. 

These potential businesses include broadcasting to vehicles and developing new customers who would use the stations’ ability to broadcast data. 

Jenkins has also been playing a major role in the development of the Television Interface Practices (TIP) standards that will reduce the complexity of buying local TV advertising and potentially boost ad revenues by automating the process. As these technologies are deployed in 2021 and beyond, they will help broadcasters compete much more effectively with digital outlets like Google and Facebook by making it much easier for advertisers to buy local media. “What always really excites me is finding technologies and using technologies to make the business perform better,” he said. 

Yvette Kanouff, Partner and CTO,JC2 Ventures

As the industry faces an unprecedented period of technological change, Yvette Kanouff lands on the 2021 list of Technology Leadership Award honorees for a long career working with transformative technologies, like video-on-demand, that changed the way people access and enjoy video. 

After earning a master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Central Florida and working in the area of pattern recognition, Kanouff started her pioneering career in digital technologies in 1994 as director of interactive television at Time Warner Cable’s Full Service Network. Here, she worked on a host of innovations, including interactive television, on-demand television, two-way networks and delivery of digital content. 

In 1997, she moved to SeaChange International, where she played a central role in bringing early on-demand technologies to market. “After the Full Service Network was shut down, I wanted to productize those technologies and bring a successful VOD product to market,” she said. That meant she had to not only prove the technology would work but show it had a viable business model. “The concept of replacing a Blockbuster home-video store with on-demand video was just inconceivable.”

Between 2012 and 2014, Kanouff held the top tech job at Cablevision Systems, where she pioneered such new technologies as the deployment of the first cloud-based DVR. She then joined Cisco Systems, heading up their video unit in 2014 and eventually taking charge of their entire service provider business, overseeing 6,000 employees. 

In 2019, she joined the venture capital world in her current role at JC2, which was founded by her former boss at Cisco, John Chambers. 

Over the years, her technical skills have earned Kanouff a host of major awards, including the NCTA Vanguard Award for Engineering and Technology and a 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award in Technology and Engineering from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. 

In the venture world, Kanouff is working with about 20 startups at JC2. They operate  in a number of areas that could be important for the future of the pay TV, telco, television and entertainment sectors in such areas as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, automation and cybersecurity. She also remains active in a number of industry organizations, including the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers/International Society of Broadband Engineers, where she is vice chairman of the SCTE Foundation. She has also been a longtime advocate of diversity in the tech sector. 

“When I joined the industry, I was very commonly the only woman in the room,” Kanouff said. “I was very lucky to have so many wonderful mentors who were sponsors of my career. So I’ve been very active in trying to help both minorities and women, and it is nice to see that this is an issue that is coming front and center.” 

Jaya Kolhatkar, Executive VP of Data, Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer & International

The rise of streaming video and direct-to-consumer streaming services has made data analytics a particularly hot topic, as major players like The Walt Disney Co. launch streaming services around the world. 

The industry’s pivot to DTC also highlights the growing importance of innovative work by experts in data analytics like Jaya Kolhatkar, the head of data analytics at Disney’s DTC operations. Her innovative work in data technologies at Hulu helped boost subscriber numbers to 39.4 million in the first quarter of 2021, up from 17 million in 2017, and created insights into consumer habits that helped Hulu’s sales team develop new ad products.

Kolhatkar said she became fascinated with data and statistics while in college, which led to an MBA from Villanova University in 1987. But she really saw the power of data analytics after graduation, when she took a job with an insurance agency that did a lot of direct marketing. 

“A lot of the marketing research I’d done before was less directly related to the day-to-day success of a company, but here I was using data analytics to make direct marketing more efficient and less costly,” she recalled. “It was a great introduction how important leveraging data can be to a company and showed that if done well it can really be a competitive advantage.”

From there, she had a series of jobs in data analytics in financial services before working as director of fraud and payments at Amazon between 1999 and 2003. There, she worked on the launch of the very successful Amazon Visa card. 

As her career progressed, Kolhatkar also became more involved in not just data analytics, but the technology infrastructure for handling that data. Between 2007 and 2011, for example, she worked with a team of engineers at eBay to develop better ways to leverage the data from their three main businesses. 

Using that experience, she and some friends at eBay launched a startup in 2011 that developed a tech platform for data analytics. It was acquired in 2013 by Walmart, where she worked until 2018, when she joined Hulu. 

Hulu had long been doing innovative work in data analytics but Kolhatkar was the first executive to oversee all those efforts. One of her early tasks was to harmonize the data and use it to help boost revenue, which led to a number of successful new products and efforts. 

In addition to using data analytics to refine new user interfaces, those insights were also applied to the development of new ad products. For example, Hulu’s sales teams capitalized on the popularity of binge viewing by developing ad strategies for it. After a viewer had watched a certain number of episodes, they would see an announcement that a single advertiser was sponsoring the episode, which would otherwise be ad-free. 

“We also found that people were pausing a lot,” Kolhatkar explained. Based on that insight, the sales team sold ad images that would appear on the screen when the video was paused. 

Last summer, Kolhatkar was promoted to her current role, heading up data teams for Disney’s direct-to-consumer services like Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus so that the company can leverage data insights across all the services. 

“We are not only looking at brand new trends from all three services but also figuring out what we can learn from the different data infrastructures,” she said. 

Stephanie Mitchko-Beale, Executive VP & Chief Technology Officer, Charter Communications

AS the top technologist at Charter Communications, Stephanie Mitchko-Beale has long been an innovator, having worked on early deployments of broadband networks, advanced advertising, cloud-based DVRs and interactive television. 

During her 15-year stint at Cablevision Systems, she won an Emmy Award for Best Interactive Television Platform as well as two Technical Emmys. Since joining Charter in 2019, she’s been overseeing tech teams building faster, more reliable networks as part of cable’s 10G initiative that will ultimately produce broadband speeds of 10GB.

This year, Mitchko-Beale isn’t just being honored for a long history of tech innovation. She is receiving B+C’s first award for Technology Leadership in Building Diverse Tech Teams for promoting diversity in the industry. 

Mitchko-Beale’s father was an engineer, and she grew up in a family where her love of math and science was encouraged as she learned to take apart radios and TVs. “I got my father’s voracious curiosity in learning how things work,” she recalled.

Studying for her engineering degree at New York University’s Polytechnic School of Engineering in 1987, she was one of the few women in the program. Even today, Mitchko-Beale is the rare woman serving as top technologist at a large corporation like Charter, which had $48.1 billion in revenue in 2020. 

While Mitchko-Beale is unusual in a top tech position, she stressed that “the diversity and inclusion conversation isn’t just about women. Having men and women of all different backgrounds, different sexes and different ethnicities being brought together for problem solving and innovation is extremely valuable.” 

She also highlighted the importance of inclusion: “You not only need different people in your organization, they have to be included and brought to the table if you want to see the benefits of that diversity.” A variety of research studies have found that companies with more diverse employees perform better as businesses. 

Such efforts are particularly important in a period of rapid technological change. “If you have a group of people who adapt and respond in the same way to issues, you don’t get the benefit of having a wider discussion,” she said. “But when you bring diversity into the picture and include people, you have this flow of ideas that helps you respond better and faster to change.”

In addition to mentoring and working with industry organizations, Mitchko-Beale stressed that simply talking about the subject is important. 

“I talk about it to my staff in staff meetings,” she said. “Are you looking at diverse slates when you are hiring people? Are you making sure we are thinking about minority-owned business? Are you creating an inclusive environment?”

She also stressed that the industry needs to encourage younger people to get involved with science, technology, engineering and math at an early age. 

Likewise, the industry needs to highlight the very interesting, innovative work that companies like Charter are doing, she said.  

“When most people think about technology they think about the tech giants, Google, Twitter, Amazon, doing cool tech things and that cable is just old cable,” Mitchko-Beale said. “In fact we are doing very interesting innovative work in things like data science, artificial intelligence, streaming media, next-generation broadband networks, mobile phone technologies and app development.” 

Barbara Lange, Executive Director, Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE)

In recent years, rapid technological change has highlighted the importance of standards in the rollout and deployment of new services and businesses. Streaming services, for example, would struggle to efficiently deliver content if there were no standardized formats for digital files and compression. 

That imperative has done more than make the work of venerable industry organizations like SMPTE and its executive director, Barbara Lange, more important than ever. It has also required significant changes in the operations of SMPTE, which was founded in 1906 in the early years of the theatrical film industry. 

“As the industry changes and the technology changes, we’ve also had to adapt,” said Lange, who is receiving a Technology Leadership Award for her work in helping SMPTE support the industry with new standards, training and information so companies can navigate a rapidly changing business and technology landscape. 

Lange arrived at SMPTE in 2011 with a resume that included work in scholarly publishing and at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional organization. “When I arrived at SMPTE many of the standards were around hardware and cables coming into the hardware,” she recalled. “But that has quickly transitioned to a world-based software so that most of our standards are now software-oriented.” 

In the last decade, SMPTE’s members and the volunteers serving on its standards committees have produced over 200 new tech standards, including on work crucial to the industry’s pivot towards streaming and digital media in such aspects as the Interoperable Master Format (IMF), High Dynamic Range (HDR) and video-over-IP. 

“We wouldn’t be where we are in not for the fantastic work of our staff, our dedicated board members and our volunteers,” said Lange, who has also spearheaded a number of operational changes to help those volunteers create new standards. 

In the last decade, for example, SMPTE made much more information available to members on its website; it began offering virtual education in 2013; it has adopted a host of new digital technologies for collaboration on standards work and in 2020 it provided educational services to over 10,000 people. 

Prior to the pandemic, that also helped boost membership by 30%. In the last year, those digital platforms expanded SMPTE’s international reach, with the number of countries represented at the SMPTE 2020 virtual event growing 133% over 2019. 

Looking forward, SMPTE will continue putting more focus on the newer technologies the industry is embracing, Lange said. “The most important thing right now is media in the cloud and how we can enable interoperability,” she said. 

“This is a 105-year-old organization and the work we do is critically important to the industry,” she noted. “We want to continue to be the unbiased platform where the industry can come and debate the technologies it needs.”

Doug Lung,VP Broadcast Technology, NBC/Telemundo Stations

Doug Lung is the rare technologist who has not only made a significant impact on the TV industry, helping build the technical infrastructure of the Telemundo station group. He is also an influential tech writer whose columns have educated two generations of engineers on a host of new technologies in the pages of TV Tech and other publications. 

Lung’s passion for finding innovative ways to use broadcasting technologies and his willingness to help others advance those technologies, began early. 

“I must have RF [radio frequency] technologies in my blood,” Lung quipped, noting that he began building radios in the late 1950s, got his ham radio license at the age of 12 and was teaching a class on amateur radio in the late 1960s while still in high school. One of his students, a chief engineer at a local radio station, was so impressed, he hired him to for an evening shift at the radio station. 

After working in the 1970s and early ’80s in radio, local cable TV, a global production center and eventually at TV station KSCI Los Angeles, Lung made an indelible mark on the broadcasting business by expanding the reach of Spanish-language television. 

In 1985, Lung joined a group of four colleagues that bought KSCI and successfully relaunched it as L.A.’s second Spanish-language station. Fueled by that success, the group then acquired and built a number of other stations that would become the Telemundo station group. Lung headed up the tech and engineering operations at these Telemundo stations until the Spanish-language broadcaster was acquired by NBC in 2002. 

In addition to his important work advancing the success of Spanish-language broadcasting in the U.S. via his work at the Telemundo stations, Lung has also been one of the most influential writers about broadcast technology. In recent decades, he’s written nearly 300 columns for TV Tech, B+C’s sister publication, and has been a contributor to journals put out by organizations like the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society, where he has focused on open-source software and innovative hardware.

“Writing the column for TV Tech has been a great opportunity because it forced me to learn about new technologies and provided me with invaluable feedback,” he said. 

Lung noted that NBCUniversal has been very supportive of that work, allowing him to discuss new technologies as long as he stresses that his comments are his own views and not those of the company. 

Lung stayed on after the acquisition of Telemundo by NBC and is currently responsible for RF and transmission technologies at NBCUniversal’s owned stations. 

Other career highlights include leading the DTV transition at the station group, compiling tech information for his transmitter.com website and working with a team of engineers to get New York’s TV stations back on the air after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Phil McKinney,President and CEO, CableLabs

Over the last year, the pandemic highlighted the importance of the CableLabs research into creating fast, reliable internet connections for home schooling and remote work, with a host of newer technologies on the horizon that could have an even bigger impact over the next decade. 

CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney came to the organization with a well-established reputation for discussing innovation on his podcast and radio show and in his books and for a long career in technology dating back to the early 1980s. His resume includes the launch of more than a dozen tech start-ups and senior tech roles at Teligent, Computer Sciences Corp. and Hewlett Packard. 

As VP and chief technology officer of Hewlett Packard’s Personal Systems Group until 2011, McKinney oversaw an operation with $40 billion in annual revenue; set up HP’s successful and widely copied Innovation Program Office to incubate and launch new products and services; and built tech teams that were listed as among the 50 most innovative by Fast Company and Bloomberg Businessweek in three different years. He also launched the Hacking Autism Foundation that he still runs. 

This background in software, IT, tech startups and Silicon Valley convinced the cable industry to hire him to head CableLabs, the industry’s tech consortium, in 2012. At that time, cable faced increased competition from tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, and MSOs were responding by placing more emphasis on IP networks, streaming, software and other widely used Silicon Valley technologies. 

“One notable part of that pivot we’ve made at CableLabs,” McKinney said, “has been to take a longer-range view, not focusing on technologies that are one to three years from coming to market but to focus on three to eight years. We wanted to take a longer view and make bigger bets around longer, larger products.” 

That has gotten CableLabs involved in a number of cutting-edge technologies, including much-faster and more reliable broadband services, artificial intelligence, new holographic lightroom imaging displays and the convergence of wireless and wired networks that will help operators deliver content and new services more seamlessly into the home. 

Such efforts could have a major impact on the overall tech landscape in the 2020s and beyond. The development of high-speed internet technologies over cable via the DOCSIS standard at CableLabs in the 1990s and 2000s helped touch off a wave of tech innovation in the early 21st century, McKinney said, as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and others built new digital services on top of the high-speed internet platform being deployed by the cable industry. 

Today, McKinney believes cable’s 10G initiative, which would enable speeds of 10 gigabits per second, will have a similar impact. “As we develop 10G, you are going to see some very interesting technologies built on top of 5GB and 10GB networks,” he said. “We are investing and working on creating an amazing platform for others to innovate on top of.” 

Phil Wiser, Executive VP/Chief Technology Officer ViacomCBS

A prime example of how executives from the streaming and digital worlds are helping major media companies build new streaming and direct-to-consumer businesses can be found in ViacomCBS’s top technologist, Phil Wiser. 

Early in his career, Wiser was the co-founder and chief technology officer of Liquid Audio, which developed underlying technologies for online music. In 2001, he moved to Sony Music, where he formed the Digital Business Group as the chief digital and technology officer, and convinced the company to ink a landmark deal with iTunes that would revolutionize the music business. 

“At Liquid Audio, we had to create the fundamental technologies to package and distribute media over the Internet,” he recalled. “Then at Sony I had a great opportunity to help them reinvent their business around digital at a time when we were starting a massive disruption of the music industry.”

After leaving Sony in 2006, Wiser co-founded the pioneering video streaming service Sezmi that offered the first internet cable bundle of channels and broadcast stations, an effort that also required new technologies. “We generated over 1,000 patents that really foreshadowed what is happening in the market today,” he said. 

After a stint as the first CTO at Hearst between 2012 and 2018, Wiser then took the top tech job at CBS, assuming his current role when Viacom and CBS merged. 

As ViacomCBS works to accelerate what were already very extensive streaming efforts with the launch of Paramount Plus this month, Wiser said: “We are working to transform our entire media operating model. That is a real disruption of everything from the way we produce our content to the way we process and distribute the content.” 

A central part of that effort is a shift to cloud-based technologies that will enable the use of newer automation systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve operations, Wiser said. 

In December of 2020, ViacomCBS said it would work with Amazon Web Services to move operations for its entire broadcast footprint, which spans 425 linear television channels and 40 global data and media centers, to the cloud. 

Looking forward, Wiser said, the creation of a new technical infrastructure will provide ViacomCBS with much greater flexibility to quickly launch new services and expand internationally, which is crucial for streaming media business models. “Paramount Plus was available in 20 markets at launch internationally,” he said. 

Wiser also believes the new infrastructure will help deliver higher-quality content, such as high dynamic range (HDR) video, and give artists new outlets for their creativity. 

“Throughout my career I’ve always been focused on artists,” he said. “So I’m particularly proud that [these tech efforts] are giving writers and creators new opportunities” to create high-quality productions that can be delivered to consumers in new ways.

Faced with a period of rapid tech innovation that is disrupting much of the traditional TV business, research into new technologies at the CableLabs, led by CEO Phil McKinney, will be worth watching over the next few years.

The impact of this research is apparent in the research consortium’s work on 10-gigabit networks, mobile convergence, artificial intelligence and new 3D holographic entertainment experiences. 

When McKinney took the top job at CableLabs in 2012, he brought with him a long career in software and tech startups, providng the expertise that he’s used to help operators speed up the pace of innovation.

“Around 82% of the U.S. now has access to 1 gigabit [of internet speeds, up from] less than 3% three years ago,” McKinney said, with more to come. “Today’s networks are not going to be the networks of 10 or 20 years from now. We are going from 1 gig to 2 gigs, to 10 and 25 gigs. It is never-ending. There is nothing to indicate that you get to some speed and you’re done.”

To help with that, CableLabs launched a 10G initiative that has already produced some successful trials with blazing 10-gigabit network speeds. “10G will not only enable the continuing growth of our networks but also improve economic growth,” McKinney said. 

Other top priorities include: research into mobile and mobile network convergence that will create new services and allow content and data to seamlessly flow between mobile and traditional cable networks; work on artificial intelligence to create more reliable, networks; cybersecurity; and new ways of creating and experiencing content like the upcoming holographic Light Field technologies, McKinney said.

Rapid change will also require more investment in training for tech teams. That imperative led to the recently announced merger with Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers /International Society of Broadband Experts (SCTE•ISBE), which will become a subsidiary of CableLabs. “There are hundreds of thousands of employees who have to be trained to deploy these new technologies,” McKinney said. “Bringing the two organizations together will create reduced overhead costs so we can invest more in training programs.” 

NEW ORLEANS - Nine months after the cable industry introduced its big catch phrase, “10G,” at CES in January, the man who coined that term himself, NCTA President and CEO Michael Powell, declared it to be a successful piece of marketing.

“It really is our new battle flag,” Powell said on stage of the opening session of this year’s Cable-Tec Expo event this morning. “It has restored in the minds of policy makers and the American public the importance of fixed networks, in addition to wireless networks.”

In short, Powell explained, the term has succeeded in its objective—whenever the wireless industry’s ubiquitous 5G calling card gets placed somewhere, there is an increasing awareness that the cable industry is also working on fixed networks that will deliver 10 gigabit-per-second symmetrical speeds.

However, during the opening session of the Society of Cable Telecommunications’ big annual trade event, itself titled "Raising the Bar," the question often came to mind, “When will we actually need 10 Gbps services?

After all, cable technologists entered this year’s expo having successfully festooned around 90% of the U.S. with DOCSIS 3.1-enabled 1 Gbps services. But none of the big cable companies are as of yet disclosing how many customers are actually using their pricy 1-gig services.

Certainly, the usual cadre of top-level cable technology engineers—which included Liberty Global’s Bill Warga, Comcast’s Tony Werner, CableLabs’ Phil McKinney and Charter’s Tom Adams—worked hard to sell the main convention hall ball room that there will soon come a day when applications like holographic display, virtual reality and autonomous cars will drive demand for much, much faster internet.

Adams, who serves as executive VP of field operations for Charter and will chair next year’s Cable-Tec Expo event, recalled that when he joined Charter seven years ago, the average internet speed threshold was around 15-30 Mbps. The growth of video streaming has increased that threshold to 200 Mbps - 1 Gbps, he noted.

Comcast’s top technologists, Werner, noted that 4K/HDR displays take up around 25 Mbps of bandwidth to play. “And in the next 24 to 36 months, i think will see another change in display technology, at least in one room of the house, that will consume a lot of bandwidth.”

Werner specifically highlighted the work of Light Field Lab, a start-up specializing in holograms that recently secured $28 million in funding from investors including Comcast.

Werner also noted that Comcast is well on its way to virtualizing its HFC networks, and has already converted some of its infrastructure to Remote PHY. However, at this point, the network infrastructure Comcast has upgraded to virtualization and Distributed Access Architecture is only capable of symmetrical 1-gig service

Later, noted inventor Dean Kamen took the stage to discuss with CableLabs chief McKinney all the aging-in-place and other bandwidth-intensive healthcare applications that will also soon require very high speeds and very low latency.

The two-and-a-half-hour session was wrapped by Preetha Vijayakumar, VP of enterprise network and communications services for FedEx. Citing all the bandwidth-intensive needs of the shipping industry, she noted, “It's my hope that we will get to the point where communications is cheap and ubiquitous, all across America.”

Vijayakumar left the stage declaring, “That’s the promise of 5G!”

ATLANTA -- Those weary of the wireless industry’s hype around 5G found a welcome opening general session at the SCTE’s annual Cable-Tec Expo show Tuesday.

The hits started with Cox Communications technology chief Kevin Hart, delivering a mild tongue-in-cheek remark during his general session intro: “You know 5G is going to be great, because it’s got 25% more G,” Hart quipped.

NCTA president and CEO Michael Powell, appearing in the session’s keynote panel, was a little more blunt: “You know what the wireless guys like most? Wireline networks,” he said, remarking on 5G’s need for backhaul and other services typically provided by HFC network operators.

Powell also said, “5G is 25% technology, 75% marketing,” dismissing the technology to little more than the wireless industry’s “latest widget.”

Appearing in the general session panel alongside Powell, CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney compared 5G to Teligent, the late-‘90s-era fixed wireless company he formerly served as CIO for before joining HP. He recalled the challenges of trying to establish point-to-point communications technologies in big cities and around phenomena including trees and fog.

“I think 5G is going to have similar issues,” McKinney said.

The cable industry org chiefs made these remarks as wireless industry companies, including Verizon, market 5G fixed wireless services as replacements for cable broadband.

Masters of cable

The featuring of Powell and McKinney, along with Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers President and CEO Mark Dzuban, on Tuesday’s opening panel session was symbolic of the SCTE’s new center-of-gravity juxtaposition in an industry trade-show universe that no longer includes the erstwhile Cable Show.

According to Dzuban, collaboration between the trio’s respective organizations is more robust than ever. “We have a good relationship spanning ideation and deployment,” he said, describing the synergy between CableLabs’ R&D capabilities, SCTE’s real-world application acumen and the NCTA’s policy-making chops.

“You could do a Venn diagram on how we overlap,” added the session's moderator, Comcast technology chief Tony Werner. “And when we get it right, it’s very powerful.”

For his part, Powell used the well-attended morning session at the Georgia World Congress to hammer home lobbying points: the cable industry doesn’t get enough credit from a policy-making perspective. Oh, and California is way out on a limb in terms of net neutrality legislation.

From a national policy-making perspective, Powell said he’s concerned that the cable industry is getting “left behind in the nation’s optimistic narrative of the future,” the fixation overly applied to tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple.

“No other industry has been as reliably consistent in doing what it says it’s going to do, deploying what it says it’s going to deploy, as this one,” Powell said, drawing applause.

Powell wondered aloud if the cable industry is perhaps too humble in not more loudly tub thumping its own innovations, like the emerging Full Duplex DOCSIS standard that will ultimately deliver 10 Gbps symmetrical broadband.

Perhaps offering cable engineers with marketing responsibilities an idea, Powell referred to this new tech as the cable industry’s “10G” standard.

He also described the NCTA as “at war” with California over its recently enacted state net neutrality legislation.

Tuesday’s session was closed by Cox president Pat Esser, who said his privately owned cable company will spend $10 billion over the next five years on network infrastructure investments. 

Like the industry it serves, the only constant is change at CableLabs.

After decades as cable’s R&D and interoperability house, the organization has been shifting its focus and more of its resources into filling an innovation pipeline for the industry. Though projects like DOCSIS certification testing are still key to the organization, CableLabs is also looking around corners to keep a close eye on what’s coming next, and what its constituents will need to be bracing for.

Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner recently caught up with CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney to get an update on the current game plan, what innovation projects he’s focused on, and his thoughts on emerging platforms such as virtual reality and 8K video.

An edited transcript follows (this feature originally appeared Monday in  the show daily distribute Monday (March 16) at the INTX show in Boston.). For more about Kyrio, the recently rebranded CableLabs-run for-profit unit, and its recent work around software-defined networking and network functions virtualization, please see this sidebar discussion with McKinney and Mitch Ashley, president and general manager of Kyrio.

Multichannel News: In January, you announced “CableLabs 2.0,” an initiative that included a restructuring and refocusing of the organization. Can you get us up to speed on the main goals and the progress you’ve made?

Phil McKinney: The CableLabs 2.0 initiative is something that's been in the works for probably over three years. When I first came to CableLabs [in 2012], the charter that the board wanted to put in place for CableLabs was for it to become the industry’s innovation lab. We spent the last three years getting the organization ready. 

In addition, we did not have a multi-gigabit strategy in place for the industry. Rather than trying to transform an organization and at the same time kick off what turned into being DOCSIS 3.1, I made the call to really keep the organization focused on DOCSIS 3.1, while we started to progress the organization toward being much more focused on longer-range innovation. 

If you look to our financial numbers through last year or even up through January of this year, roughly about 14% of our spend was focused on longer-range innovation -- things that are three-plus years out. The rest of it is in the three-year timeframe, what I'd call applied research. 

Our total technical spend is not changing...in terms of total dollars spent on our programs; it's really this rebalancing of the priorities such that 50% of our spend is in applied research, and  50% of our spend is on longer-range innovation work. 

The best example of a project with a longer range...is the result of Full Duplex DOCSIS, symmetrical DOCSIS over HFC. 

MCN: What’s the status on Full Duplex, and the timing on when you'd expect it to become an official extension of DOCSIS 3.1? 

PM: We're still working on it and progress is looking very, very promising. Our current...plan is that Full Duplex DOCSIS will transition from an innovation project to moving it into a full R&D project. When that happens, the funding scales up significantly, the resourcing for that project scales up significantly, working groups get established, and that's when vendors get engaged.

We're anticipating that to be mid-summer timeframe...around the time of Summer Conference [CableLabs has that event scheduled for August 7-9 in Keystone, Colo.].  

MCN: Outside of CableLabs 2.0, what do you see as the big focus areas for CableLabs heading into the second half of 2016?

PM: Again, it's 50/50 from a funding and resourcing commitment. We’ve made good progress in getting that balance in place. We just had our Inform[ED] conference focused on our wireless work. Wireless work continues to be important. Wireless is not constrained to being R&D or innovation...we float [those resources] back and forth.

For us, it's about pushing the organization to look beyond the horizon and be the scouts for the industry about what's coming next. And that we are doing the ground work on developing those technologies, getting the intellectual property in place such that when those get within range of having an impact on the industry you're not starting from ground zero. 

The other key is to make sure we have that robust innovation pipeline. We had a good pipeline, but we're putting more emphasis on researching and experimenting and looking at co-innovation partners. 

MCN: What other areas that are on the radar for the innovation projects? Would virtual reality fall into that? 

PM: We have not discussed specific projects. In fact, Full Duplex is the only project we talk about specifically. But as far as broad areas that we're interested in, it falls into the categories of active networks [HFC and fiber], a lot of work going on in wireless, and security, as well as what we call next-generation experiences...specifically when you get into multi-gigabit kind of networks to homes and businesses.  VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) fall into what we consider are these next-generation kinds of experiences. 

MCN: DOCSIS 3.1 appears to be humming right along as equipment gets certified and MSOs like Comcast prepare for commercial deployments. What’s your sense these days on the use cases that will require speeds of 1-gig or more.

PM: The joke in the ISP world is when someone asks what's the app you run on a multi-gig network...today it's only Speed Test. 

MCN: That says a lot, doesn't it? 

PM:  It’s not about sustained multi-gigabit speeds, it's about what I call "fast synch" -- you get on the network and you've got some cloud service and, boom, everything is synchronized. You want to download the move into your iPad because you're catching an airplane, boom, it's on there. 

It's not about that I'm going to draw 2-gigs on the network continuously; it's really around the periodic apps where you're looking to get data movement back and forth very, very quickly. 

If you look out a few more years, and you look at autonomous vehicles, then our conversations are with the major auto manufacturers around what the bandwidth requirements are going to be.

With autonomous vehicles, you bring them home and park them in your garage, there's a lot of data that gets synchronized between the vehicle and the auto companies for things like updating the driving information, road conditions, all those sorts of things.  They [the auto makers] are estimating that they're going to need between 200 to 300 gigabytes per month to go back and forth between the vehicle. 

MCN: How does VR factor into the potential use cases?

With VR, the experiences today are okay. We think that they're too low resolution and too low of a frame rate. They need to be at least 120 frames and at least be 4K in what we call the viewing space -- where you're actually looking. 

Today VR is 4K, but it's 4K wrapped across the entire 360-degree space. When you get it up to a resolution with a 4K viewing area and you have 120 frames…you're looking in the neighborhood of 150 to 250 Mbps to stream that. On top of that, three people in your house watching VR simultaneously streamed and you're coming up on a gigabit pretty fast. 

MCN: VR continues to get buzz as new higher end headsets come out and more content and services are developed for them. But when do you think adoption will become mainstream? 

PM: My guess is we'll probably hit holiday season 2018 when we reach the true mainstream.

We're still in this novelty, nichey kind of thing. Unity [Technologies] is doing some interesting work on engines to make it easier to create content. There are some great tools that are coming online in the next six months. There are some movies in early stage production to be fully developed as 360 dramatic, but you basically have to change the whole format of storytelling.

MCN: We've been tracking 4K developments as they progress, but how soon before your constituents need to be thinking about 8K? 

PM: For 8K, the project at CableLabs is being driven by [Japan's] J:COM, our second-largest international member behind Liberty Global. J:COM has a regulatory obligation to be broadcasting 8K by 2020, in time for the [Olympic] Games in Tokyo.  

In the reality in our testing, consumers can't tell resolution. We put a 4K set up and an HD set up, and only 61% of consumers could even figure out which TV was 4K and which TV was HD, at proper distance.

However, what we have seen is High Dynamic Range and what the many of the TV guys refer to as Ultra HD. With better color, consumers will perceive it as being a higher resolution. 

MCN: Focusing on mobile, different MSOs will have different strategies with respect to wireless and mobility, but how do you see cable’s role in this area evolving in the next few years?  Will it become a key priority?

PM: It's already a pretty big priority if you look at what the bigger guys are doing, such as Comcast and Charter and Cablevision [Systems] in terms of footprint that they've built out [with WiFi]. Let's face it, consumers want to take their broadband with them, they don't want to leave it at home. 

All of the MSOs are saying wireless is important now. They’re all going about it in different ways in terms of: "What does wireless mean?"  Shaw [Communications] buys Wind [Mobile] and is in the middle of an upgrade to 4G/LTE as part of that expansion, and you've already got Rogers [Communications]. Then we have the MNOs [mobile network operators] buying cable operators in the form of  Vodafone having bought ONO in Spain and KDG in Germany. Why? Because they need access to that network, particularly for backhaul for their small cell strategies.  

So you see this convergence where you've got the MNOs are looking to cable as a great infrastructure play and you've got cable looking at wireless, saying it's a great service offering to be able to extend the reach of their broadband services no matter where they're at.

You're seeing this convergence with the cable operators with a great fixed network that's been built up over decades and you've got the MNOs that need to go to a small cell strategy to create the bandwidth and to deliver better services, and they need access to those assets. Everybody wants to offer broadband services to their customers where they might be -- meet the customers where they're at, not force those customers to come to some location. 

New York — The cable industry seems destined for wired-wireless convergence as consumers demand access to services in the home and on the go, but how MSOs will get there is far from certain.

Creating a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in partnership with an existing wireless carrier might work for some, and there’s still plenty of speculation that a large player like Comcast could someday make a move to buy a T-Mobile or Sprint if the opportunity (and the price) were right.

Future wireless and mobile strategies for the cable industry, as well as game-shifting 5G technologies, were among the key themes discussed at last week’s Inform[ed] Wireless conference in New York, an inaugural one-day event hosted by CableLabs.

FASTEST-GROWING SEGMENT

Wireless and mobility are becoming increasingly important for cable, Phil McKinney, CableLabs’s CEO, said, noting that those areas have become the fastest-growing segment at the R&D organization.

Beyond the ongoing Cable WiFi initiative, which continues to deploy hundreds of thousands of hotspots in various public and quasi-public venues, several MSOs around the world have worked out MVNO deals (General Communication Inc. of Alaska and Liberty Global, for example), operate their own mobile networks (Rogers Communications of Canada), or are mobile carriers at their core but are also expanding into cable (Vodafone, which now owns Kabel Deutschland of Germany and Ono of Spain).

“We’re seeing this converged network,” McKinney said, adding that consumers “don’t want that broadband service to stop at the front door.”

But how those strategies will evolve for many MSOs, particularly in the U.S., is still being sorted out and debated — a topic taken on by a panel led by two top industry analysts.

Though the wireless and mobile sector is heated and saturated, it gives cable a prime opportunity to seek opportunities that are adjacent to their existing businesses for a market that is about 2.5 times larger than the one cable’s serving today.

“To me, it looks like an absolute no-brainer,” Jonathan Chaplin, managing partner at New Street Research, said during the panel discussion.

He said he sees several ways cable MSOs can get into that market, including a WiFi-only approach; a WiFi-and-MVNO play; network sharing deals; building a network from scratch; and acquiring another provider.

Chaplin said WiFi-only is not a product. “My apologies to Cablevision [Systems],” he said, noting that the MSO has been travelling that path with its Freewheel service. “It’s a niche product that goes after a very small part of the opportunity … That’s not exciting.”

And building a network from scratch is too expensive. Cox Communications tried it, at great expense, and eventually threw in the towel. That leaves MVNO-focused strategies and acquisitions and partnerships among the most viable options for some MSOs.

Comcast already has the MVNO option available to it through deals with Sprint and Verizon Communications, and has begun to trigger its arrangement with Verizon, but has not announced what it will do next or when.

Chaplin said Comcast has little to lose here.

“It makes all the sense in the world to start leveraging that MVNO and to start testing the market,” he said, noting that Comcast could, for example, use that to learn more about how to position products, determine if it needs to have a big retail presence and how deeply it would need to subsidize the handsets.

“The economics are attractive enough,” Chaplin said, but warned that the MVNO structure Comcast would have to live with doesn’t give it much control over the product. “That’s not an ideal long-term strategy, either.”

But Comcast could use it as a “stepping stone” for a longer- term approach that gives it more control of the product and the relationship with the customer.

And, because of that, Chaplin said he also thinks it makes sense for Comcast to make a play in the upcoming spectrum auctions. If Comcast comes away with spectrum, particularly with blocks that provide national coverage, it would be in position to broaden its options.

Paul de Sa, vice president and senior analyst at Bernstein Research, held that cable is already a dominant carrier of residential wireless traffic, given its WiFi coverage in and out of homes.

But he also agreed that the cash for wireless is in the cellular/mobile industry, though cable operators can make some scratch here and there by providing non-subs with paid access to their WiFi networks or using WiFi to sell higher-speed broadband tiers. Plus, cable has already established a nice revenue stream with its wireless backhaul business.

While cable has a decent default position (doing nothing new), de Sa said during the panel that he also thinks MSOs must weigh the risks and rewards of entering the cellular mix having missed the growth market, and of jumping into a sector that is dominated by the four major carriers.

“It’s difficult for fringe players to disrupt that [mobile market],” de Sa said, noting that cable would be pressed to enter that arena “without any compelling consumer proposition” given little evidence that a bundle with a wireless component gives much value to the provider. And simply competing on price won’t be enough to move the needle much in what’s now a saturated market.

ON THE FRINGES

He also said that while there aren’t any right or wrong answers yet, aligning with Verizon under an MVNO deal is the obvious path for some operators despite the limitations with respect to product control that presents, as is aligning with a “fringe” player, like Google is doing with T-Mobile and Sprint for its Project Fi hybrid cellular/WiFi offering.

Buying a fringe player and attacking the duopoly of AT&T and Verizon is yet another option, if the price is right.

Any one of those choices is appealing, de Sa said, though “none are overly compelling.”

“Staying neutral,” he added, “is also not a bad option.” In a panel later in the day, Rob Howald, senior vice president at Comcast, toed the company line when asked about the MSO’s intentions with respect to the coming 600-MHz incentive auction.

Comcast, which previously said it will participate in the auctions, is “assessing [its] options carefully in that space,” Howald said, adding that the MSO is still doing its homework on any possible strategies it might go with.

But on a broader level, he said, any focus on cellular by Comcast is to “make sure that existing services are well complemented outside the home,” rather than worrying about some “magic” around a quad play offering that was once under consideration by various cable operators.

SIDEBAR: The Slow Road to 5G

NEW YORK — 5G, an emerging standard that represents a quantum leap over 4G/LTE, promises to enhance current mobile and wireless experiences in many ways.

A big one is a jump in the ability to deliver at least 10 Gigabits per second per cell. 5G will also facilitate the so-called Internet of Things, as well as critical apps and communications services that require super-low latency, such as autonomous, self-driving vehicles and other high forms of robotics.

Technically speaking, that low-latency element will be pushed forward by virtualization techniques that will allow for a more distributed network in which software apps are running at the edge.

5G standards are still being developed, and deployments aren’t expected to be underway until at least 2020.

Though some of those use cases can employ LTE, 5G offers a combination of capabilities that hit them all, Bob Berner, chief technology officer of Rogers Communications, said during a mid-day keynote at the Inform[ed] Wireless conference.

But the big question, he said, is whether there’s enough money in those markets to justify the economics in these high-band frequencies that can work over short ranges.

“Spectrum is the real estate of the mobile business,” Berner said. But the wireline business will also expand — a good sign for cable — because those wireless hubs still need to be connected to high-capacity terrestrial networks.

Berner also said 5G has the potential to play a role in cable operators’ networks, suggesting that a 5G small cell at the edge of the wired network could prevent having to run fiber all the way to the home.

In a follow up panel, Bjorn Ekelund, head of device technology and ecosystem at Ericsson Research, agreed that 5G is being viewed as a potential fiber replacement.

Another new characteristic that 5G will bring is the idea of “network slicing” — the ability to micromanage the network for specific use cases as they arise.

And though 5G standards are not yet cooked, “5G is really happening,” Ekelund insisted, pointing out that Ericsson has 21 field trial agreements in place with carriers.

In the meantime, 4G still has plenty of life left in it and will be complemented by 5G, Timothy Burke, vice president of strategic technology at Liberty Global, said.

Sidebar: Small Cells Equal Big Opportunity

New York — Even if cable operators stay out of the mobile service game to a large degree, they are well positioned to continue to make hay on backhauling them with their hybrid fiber/coax and fiber-only infrastructures, particularly with the increased need for small-cell infrastructures and 5G technologies on the horizon.

Small cells are factoring in as carriers and venues seek out ways to handle big, spikey data loads in concentrated, heavy-traffic areas that aren’t supported well by the macro cellular network.

Crown Castle owns 40,000 tower locations in the U.S. and, as part of a market expansion, now supports about 16,000 small cells, Phil Kelley, the company’s senior vice president of corporate development and strategy, said.

And that demand will increase as mobile moves into 3.5-GHz and 5-GHz spectrum.

“It’s backhaul, power and access,” Jeremy Bye, vice president of carrier and wholesale at Cox Communications, said, noting that the MSO launched a small-cell service last year. “When you have all of those, it really fits well into our business model.”

CableLabs, the industry’s Colorado-based R&D house, is reducing its workforce by at least 30 staffers amid a reorganization that will see the Colorado-based R&D house prioritize spending on longer-term “innovation projects” and “funding game-changing innovations.”

When contacted last week, CableLabs declined to confirm how many workers have been let go as part of the decision, but sources familiar with the decision said the decision affected people in CableLabs’s video and applications group, as well as some in its networks group.

Update: CableLabs confirmed Tuesday (January 19) that 27 employees were affected. The original headline in this story said 30-plus employees were cut as a result of the restructuring. 

Phil McKinney, the former HP exec who was named president and CEO of CableLabs, in mid-2012, discussed some of the changes in a blog post today under the headline: “CableLabs 2.0.”

“With the work done over the last three years in addressing the fundamentals, now is the time to significantly increase the funding in innovation,” he wrote. “The transformation we are announcing today involves prioritizing the investment in innovation projects focused on three to eight years as being of equal importance to our traditional R&D projects focused on one to three years. These longer range innovations will become the source for the R&D projects of the future.

While most organizations spend a small portion of their budget on longer range innovation, we’ve made the deliberate decision to be aggressive in this transformation to ensure that CableLabs can rapidly build and sustain a significant innovation pipeline for the industry.”

The shift also comes as CableLabs has extended its focus into areas such as WiFi, LTE-Unlicensed, software-defined networking/network functions virtualization, while also keeping close tabs on technology developments around 4K and virtual reality.

Update: CableLabs said Sunday that the organization has not dropped MSO-related SDN/NFV research activities following the shift in focus, disputing what an industry source told Multichannel News.  

CableLabs's shift in focus also comes comes soon after the cable industry reached a big milestone, as cable modem products from five vendors were certified by CableLabs for the new multi-gigabit DOCSIS 3.1 platform, aided by new processes that helped to accelerate that work.

McKinney wouldn’t go into all the areas that will see increased investment, but did identify a few, including virtual reality (“a hot area in the innovation space”), next-gen video technologies (including future versions of high dynamic range and display materials), and more focus on cable’s growing role in healthcare technology.

“If you want to have a meaningful impact on it [the innovation pipeline], you’ve got to align a chunk of resources against that effort, otherwise it becomes more of a hobby or a secondary activity for the organization,” McKinney said in an interview. “This move, what we call CableLabs 2.0, is that aligning of a significantly increased amount of resources focused on creating an innovation pipeline." 

CableLabs wouldn’t say how staffing levels are changing amid this shift of focus, but McKinney said there’s no change in the total budget or the total funding for the MSO-backed organization, which also operates a facility in Silicon Valley that opened in the fall of 2013. Additionally, he doesn't expect the overall staffing level at CableLabs to change as it realigns its focus.  

“Anytime you're trying to do a transformation like this, there's some people that move across and become part of those expanded focus areas,” McKinney said. “And in some cases you move people out of an organization to free up resources that can be invested in the innovation space.”

And that focus will also impact which projects are on the front burner and which ones get mothballed.

“If we don’t’ believe [projects] are going to have high impact on the industry in those [innovation] areas, we'll actually cancel those projects,” he said. “That frees up resources, budgets and headcount and we’ll allocate those budgets and headcounts to new areas." 

CableLabs took on a broader, global focus in 2013, when it combined with Cable Europe Labs. CableLabs now has 55 members in 33 countries that serve about 180 million video subs. Membership fees, paid on a quarterly basis by MSOs, represent a key source of revenue for CableLabs, which also gets revenue from its own events, interoperability testing, and as well as from a for-profit device-security unit, called NetworkFX, that was spun-out in 2012.

New Orleans — More than any single force shaping the television and broadband industry, technology is driving the biggest change.

Engineers and executives steeped in hardware and software acronyms, domestic and international, picked apart the biggest challenges faced by the industry, spanning mobile, multi-gigabit broadband, the IP video transition and a host of others, at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans last week.

Waxing Wireless

While U.S. cable operators are leaning heavily on WiFi to lead their wireless strategies, Liberty Global has also been pushing hard on quad-play offerings that tie in the MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) model.

Mobile “is becoming the primary computing device,” Balan Nair, the MSO’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, said during a presentation about technology trends and how the operator is handling new forms of competition.

Liberty Global now has about 4.5 million mobile subscribers through its MVNO relationships (that subscriber number is expected to grow to 8 million through the MSO’s M&A activity). Nair said Long Term Evolution (LTE) allows for seamless connectivity, and the technology is on the road to delivering gigabit capacities.

“LTE is here to stay,” Nair said.

But WiFi “is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our story going forward,” he said, noting that delivering a good WiFi experience in the home matters more to many consumers than the wired broadband pipe connecting the home itself.

Nair also shed some light on Liberty Global’s future plans, telling the crowd the MSO is working on its first “WiFi-first” device, which would prefer WiFi access when it’s available and seamlessly fall back to the LTE mobile network when it’s not.

Enabling that seamless transition “is not an easy thing to do,” Nair allowed, adding that Liberty Global expects to introduce the WiFi-first product toward the fourth quarter of 2016.

During the follow-up panel moderated by Cox Communications president Pat Esser, Nair outlined four ways cable operators can enter the mobile game — they can build and operate the network themselves (if they have spectrum); buy another mobile provider; launch a “lite” MVNO whereby the MSO is relegated as a reseller; or introduce a “full” MVNO play where the operator builds out the mobile “core,” keeps call control and essentially rents access to the radios and base stations.

Liberty Global has tried out all four, and Nair was direct about the issues cable operators face with the home-grown route.

“I’ll tell you, building sucks,” he said. Though Liberty Global was able to obtain spectrum relatively cheaply, the MSO shut down its home-grown network about 18 months after launching it.

He said Liberty Global has found the most success, from an operational and economic standpoint, with the full MVNO approach, which allows the operator to control the SIM card that goes in the smartphone.

“In the end, it’s about handsets and price,” he said, noting that he puts the lite MVNO on the “bottom of the list” because the operator has no control — it’s just about renting and selling.

Nair also talked up the positive effect quad-play bundles have on customer retention.

“Over time, the churn rate is discernable between a quad-play and a non quad-play,” he said. “There’s a downside, though. If you screw up with mobile, you lose all four — you lose the whole quad-play.”

Service Agility, IP Video, Cybersecurity

The technology chiefs jumped to other topics during Wednesday’s conversation, including service agility, customer-centricity, the all-IP progression and cybersecurity.

Comcast, fresh off the national rollout of its voice remote, will launch an add-on called “X1 Answers” in mid-November, MSO executive vice president and CTO Tony Werner said.

“You’ll be able to ask, ‘What was the Broncos score?’ ‘How tall is the Empire State Building?’ I think it’s going to change a lot of things,” he said.

The transition to all-IP is foundational to proactive change, Werner and others said. By this time next year, Comcast will have deployed 8 million pure- IP set-tops, which matters to serving video on second screens.

“We have the same number of baby boomers as millennials right now, and the millennials are watching a lot more content on mobile,” Werner said. “If we have 24 million customer relationships and 15 million video starts in a week [on mobile devices] — that’s exponential, and it will probably only continue to grow. If you don’t have video over IP, you’re going to miss a big part of the audience — and it’s a growing part, not a shrinking part.”

Rolling out more features and services more quickly is a big priority for all network operators, execs said.

Liberty Global, which is deploying only Reference Design Kit-based devices and will begin converting to HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Codec) for 4K/Ultra HD video next year, will get to service agility using defined and publishable APIs (Application Program Interfaces), Nair said.

“I just want to build a stack that has almost every functionality covered by APIs — it’s a big transition for us,” Nair said.

For Nomi Bergman, president of Bright House Networks, the near-term product future includes more 10-Gigabit EPON (Ethernet Passive Optical Network), with an eye toward 100-G EPON. “We’re now helping to create the standard for that,” she said.” Also hot in BHN markets: Its “Echo”-branded whole-home WiFi solution.

“It represents a really nice collaboration between the technology, product and marketing teams,” she said.

On the heels of Tuesday’s Cybersecurity Symposium, Nair described a massive hack in the Netherlands, where 2 million broadband connections were shut down, two nights in a row. The four perpetrators were arrested a couple of weeks ago, and the incident caused Liberty to overhaul its crisis handling mechanisms.

“In dealing with communications, law enforcement, regulatory, PR — as it turned out, what we had wasn’t the most easily translatable during a crisis. We had to rebuild a lot of our processes,” Nair said.

Panelists were also asked to discuss some things they’re working on today. Phil McKinney, president and CEO of CableLabs, said his thinking tends to gravitate to what’s coming tomorrow, noting that his group has been focused on “exponential technologies” — things that are outside the scope of the traditional planning cycle.

He said he worries about “what’s beyond the horizon … so that we don’t get surprised.”

Read more news from SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.

When it comes to preparing tests and setting specs for cable’s emerging DOCSIS 3.1 platform, it’s been full speed ahead at CableLabs.

Development of DOCSIS 3.1 technologies are “slightly ahead of the original schedule that we laid out two years ago when we kicked off 3.1 activities,” Phil McKinney, the president and CEO of Louisville, Colo.-based CableLabs, said in a recent interview. 

With the first DOCSIS 3.1 chips expected to emerge by the end of 2014, McKinney sees 3.1 interops getting underway by the first half of 2015, with certification to follow in the early part of the second half of 2015.

“Then you’ll start to see physical deployments by the end of 2015,” he predicted.

And let there be no doubt that DOCSIS 3.1 is a major priority for the industry.

“Every time I have a conversation with any of the [cable operator] CEOs, typically the first part of the conversation is not about the weather; it’s about the status of DOCSIS 3.1,” McKinney said.

Expect more details on DOCSIS 3.1’s progress to emerge at this week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver. On Monday afternoon (September 22), during the event’s pre-show Symposium, Jorge Salinger, the vice president of access architecture at Comcast; and Belal Hamzeh, director and principal architect at CableLabs, are on tap to report on the current status and schedule for DOCSIS 3.1.

CableLabs released the initial product specs for DOCSIS 3.1 last October, and, of recent note, published the cable modem OSS interface specs for DOCSIS 3.1 on June 19. The platform is targeting up to 10 Gbps in the downstream and at least 1 Gbps in the upstream using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and a new forward error correction (FEC) scheme, Low Density Parity Check (LDPC), that will enable operators to use their bandwidth more efficiently and pump out more bits per hertz. 

While McKinney believes we’re yet to see residential apps that require sustained 1-Gig speeds, he says it still makes sense for cable to pursue such capabilities.

“The question we always get is, ‘What the heck do you do once you get 1-Gig into a house? What service requires it?’” McKinney said, noting that 1-Gig could handle 40 simultaneous  4K streams into the house.

“Today, there’s nothing in the marketplace that needs a 1-Gig sustained speed. However, one service today that consumers do value when you get to those kinds of speeds is really not so much the issue of speed overall as it latency, is what I call the ‘fast sync.’  You come into your house and if you could burst to 1-Gig to get your email synchronized, your TV shows onto your iPad because you’re dashing out to a flight…it’s that feeling of having instantaneous  access to your information so you can be productive everywhere you go.”

Multichannel News will feature the full Q&A with McKinney as part of its daily coverage of this week’s Cable-Tec Expo. In it, McKinney also offers an update on CableLabs’ activities around security, 4K/Ultra HD, fiber-to-the-premises technology, and concerns on how Unlicensed LTE could affect the cable industry’s evolving WiFi strategies.

 Please visit our SCTE Cable-Tec Expo micro-site for the latest news and announcements from the tech-fest in Denver.