Let the DOCSIS 3.1 plugfests begin.

Following up on a prediction made at last month’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver, CableLabs has slated its first-ever DOCSIS 3.1 interop for the week of Dec. 1, 2014.

And with this tweet, CableLabs confirmed that vendor registration is now opened to those that want to bring in their gear for the initial plugfest for early-stage products designed for an emerging platform that will support multi-gigabit speeds over HFC.

A CableLabs official also said there’s no charge for vendors to participate in the interop (aside from travel and personal expenses, of course. “In order to attend, vendors need to fill out the registration form and then CableLabs vets them,” the official added.

So vendors get a break for participating in the D3.1 interop. Under CableLabs’ current pricing, cable modem certification runs $75,000, and CMTS feature set testing starts at $25,000 for one unit, and up to $200,000 for up to 20 units (CableLabs overhauled its CMTS qualification testing structure earlier this year in support of a more bite-sized, feature-focused approach).

But who’s going to show up at this early stage? So far, no one has raised their hand or confirmed that they will indeed be there for the milestone event.

On the network side of the equation there are several cable modem termination system vendors that that have DOCSIS 3.1 in their sights, making Arris, Cisco Systems and Casa Systems among the logical candidates.

Arris, for one, will not be there, acknowledging that it won’t participate in the December lab interop, but is having talks with CableLabs about joining one in January.

Update: Cisco's participation at the December is undecided (as of October 21), according to a spokeswoman.

But Arris, a spokeswoman noted, is supporting the CableLabs DOCSIS 3.1 testing efforts with its flagship E6000, adding that the company demonstrated what it claims to be the first live, public D3.1-based transmission last month at the SCTE event in Denver. There, Arris showed the E6000 running a D3.1-based downstream that utilized orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), a modulation scheme that is part of the new CableLabs specs, in tandem with cable modem test boards from Intel and STMicroelectronics.

“Creating pathways to CCAP interoperability is crucial to ensuring a seamless D3.1 migration, and we commend CableLabs in its efforts to continually advance the development of this standard,” the Arris official added.

It’s also not clear yet if Intel, Broadcom or STMicro will join the party with any modem silicon. An exec with a leading DOCSIS modem vendor suspects that any CPE featured at the interop will likely be based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology.

Official certification and qualification testing for DOCSIS 3.1 is expected to get underway as as early as the second quarter of 2015. 

Before the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo fades deeper into our memory banks, it’s a good time to bring up one of the show’s primary themes – improving the customer experience. 

And I don’t have to be the first person to tell anyone that cable could sure use some improvement in this area. It’s one of the reasons why Comcast now has an executive – Charlie Herrin, its new senior vice president, customer experience -- solely focused on this area.

And the industry’s lagging position in the area came up in one of the opening general sessions at this year's show in Denver, with Tony Werner, Comcast’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, acknowledging that companies like Amazon, Zappos and Uber are raising the bar on the consumer experience. “We haven’t lived up to the old bar,” Werner said.

Hey, to fix a problem, one must first admit that the problem exists, rather than hoping against hope that ignoring it will make it magically vanish.

So, Uber. Werner identified the car-hailing service as one of the prime examples cable should be living up to from an experience standpoint. A lot of people use it. I’ve used it. It’s nice to be able to track when my ride will show up, what kind of car my driver is driving, know what my driver looks like, and (gasp!) communicate directly with said driver. And the driver knows I’ll be submitting a rating based on how well he or she does the job, so there's an enhanced layer of accountability in play here. And I don’t have to worry about paying with cash. All-in-all, Uber’s provided me with a user experience (down to the smell) that’s better than what I usually get from a traditional taxi cab.

Given how Uber’s platform performs and its aren't-I-cool cache, it’s now popular for a company to say they’re going to Uber-ize whatever it is they do.

Cable’s no different. In fact, “the Uberi-zation of cable” was part of a pitch I got awhile back from CSG Systems, a billing and customer care company that works with Comcast and other MSOs, and is one of the companies in the industry that might have an actual say in how the industry can improve the customer experience.

According to Chad Dunavant, CSG’s vice president of North American products, his company and the cable guys are working on systems that can deliver an Uber-like experience – giving customers a way to track the truck, know when the technician will arrive, provide the customer with some knowledge about the person who is on the way, and, generally, enabling a tightening of the appointment window… things that can boost the overall experience.

And that sort of platform, enabled by enhanced field workforce apps that use geographic analytics and GPS info and algorithms can estimate things like drive time, can also improve an operator's bottom line -- for one, reducing call center, which can run $5 to $8, depending on the length of the call.

“The need for techs are increasing, not decreasing,” Dunavant said, noting that services are getting increasingly complex with the whole-home WiFi and home security and automation entering the mix.

And that’s just on the reactive end. By making better use of scheduling calendar data, systems will also be more proactive, making outbound calls or text messages to notify customer of appointments on the day before or the day of the appointment, and allowing customers to reschedule appointments directly from an app.

“It leads to that Uber-like experience,” Dunavant said, noting that some of those piece-parts, including real-time notifications, are already here today. CSG’s Workforce Express scheduling and resource allocation manager for field techs already store tech profiles, but more integration will be required to pull together the full vision.

“The entire ecosystem change starts to happen during the next nine-to-twelve months,” he said.

While Uber isn’t perfect (recent accounts of its vicious, over-the-top competitive tactics might lead some to view Uber as too cable-like in some areas), it does provide elements of an overall customer experience that cable can and should shoot for as the industry seeks ways to improve its tarnished and marred customer service legacy.

DENVER -- Layer3 TV, a startup that is billing itself as a “next-generation cable operator,” opened up its Denver-based corporate headquarters on September 15, and now employs a total of about 50 people across its Colorado and Boston locations, company officials confirmed here this week.

Its Denver headquarters is located on the 8th floor of 1660 Wynkoop Street, an 11-story building in the city's vibrant LoDo district, placing it nearby venues such as Union Station and Coors Field.

Founded in 2013, Layer3 TV now operates in three locations – its Denver headquarters, a distribution facility in the Denver area, and an office in Boston.

Layer3 TV announced in May that it would make Denver its home base while retaining its presence in Boston. At the time, the company said it plans to offer 312 new jobs in the Denver area, offering an average wage of $92,083. In support of the expansion and corporate relocation, the state of Colorado awarded Layer3 TV $2.9 million in job growth incentive tax credits and workforce development and technical assistance. Layer3 TV is also one of the companies featured in this campaign video from Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper.

Layer3 TV, the topic of much chatter at this week’s SCTE Cable Tec-Expo in Denver, is still being coy about its specific strategy and how that might compete with or complement more traditional multichannel video programming distributors. The company, which has raised $21 million so far, also has not announced when it intends to launch its service offering.

What is clear, though, is that Layer3 TV is in hiring mode, and has recently added some recognizable industry names to its lineup. During a visit to the company’s headquarters this week, Layer3 TV CEO Jeff Binder said John Roy, the former VP of national operations at Comcast who is also late of Charter Communications and Adelphia Communications, joined Layer3 TV as senior vice president of operations.

Additionally, Bob Scheffler, a co-founder of Broadbus Technologies (where Binder served as CEO before it was acquired by Motorola in 2006), recently joined Layer3 TV as head of architecture. During his subsequent time at Motorola, Scheffler continued his work on multiscreen backoffice systems and network/cloud DVR technologies.

While Layer3 TV has been somewhat quiet on its specific strategy, the company has been shedding some light on that during recent meetings at the FCC.

As this ex parte filing shows, Layer3 TV execs visited with members of the Commission on September 10 to discuss the company’s approach to multichannel video program distribution. During that meeting, the topic of the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal came up, as did the topic of network neutrality.

According to the filing, Layer3 TV “took no position at this time on whether the merger should be allowed,” but did offer net neutrality “safeguards” that the FCC might consider if the mega-merger was approved with conditions.

Layer3 TV didn’t list them out at the meeting, but did so in the ex parte filing. On its list:

-The ability to interconnect, for a reasonable price, at locations proximate to the customer base a company is trying to serve.

-Data caps, while appearing to safeguard a network from overload, present a challenge for companies serving video streams to the end user.

-From a business side, Layer3 TV offered that “bundling discounts” need to reflect some basis in cost differential, such that they are not used to discriminate use of  the high-speed data service for competitive video purposes.

-Layer3 TV respectfully suggested that the FCC might consider some cap on peering charges based upon the total payload in a given month, whereby the costs  are not so prohibitive as to prevent potential video competition.

Layer3 TV’s discussion at the FCC also went beyond the scope of “the potential for strict access to the Comcast network,” noting that Comcast-owned content “must be sold to competitive companies at a reasonable price,” and any rights to content owned by Comcast must be on par with those granted to the cable operator itself with respect to areas such as network DVRs, the ability to preload content on a DVR, and TV Everywhere apps.

Another SCTE Cable-Tec Expo is in the books, and there was plenty to see and do in Denver, and there’s more to think about as the dust continues to settle, but here are five quick takeaways:

DOCSIS 3.1 is making big progress:  If it wasn’t clear enough heading into the show, it’s now crystal clear – cable’s pushing hard on DOCSIS 3.1. With interoperability plugfests slated for later this year and official certification/qualification testing anticipated to get underway as early as mid-2015, the industry is pushing the ball forward on a platform that will put cable operators in position to offer multi-gigabit services on a wide scale.

U.S. cable will play WiFi to the hilt: With a half-day dedicated to the topic, consider WiFi a front-burner project for the industry. While WiFi will continue to be used as a way to extend the reach of cable’s high-speed infrastructure inside and outside the home, there’s a subtle drumbeat that cable will indeed use WiFi as a voice platform, perhaps following the “WiFi First” cellular-fallback approach that Scratch Wireless is advocating.

Layer3 TV is the industry’s new cool kid:  DOCSIS 3.1 and WiFi were the talk of the show, but Layer3 TV dominated the chatter – everyone seemed to be talking about this Denver-based startup, which is billing itself as a next-generation cable operator, but is still being coy about its overall strategy. Multichannel News caught up with the company in Denver and will be posting an update on its progress shortly.

Cable’s getting energized about energy conservation: A keynote from Comcast’s John Schanz and the follow up panel on the industry’s Energy 2020 plan to reduce power consumption by 20%, energy costs by 25% and grid dependency by 10% shows that the industry is pretty darn serious about this initiative.  The goals are set. Now comes the hard part: Executing on them.

Signs Of consolidation were all around us: Despite a fantastic showing at the DOCSIS 3.1/WiFi pre-show Symposium and a nice boost in terms of vendor support and a jump in international attendance, overall attendance, at about 9,100, was down from the 9,800 who were on hand at last year’s gathering in Atlanta. Private conversations with MSOs and suppliers indicated that there’s much wariness on how the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable will affect the industry.

No one (who we talked to, anyway) at Cable-Tec Expo was jazzed about the new name of The Cable Show:  Or at least I couldn’t find anyone who had a positive reaction to the decision to shift the name of The Cable Show to The Internet and Television Expo (INTX) starting with next year’s confab in Chicago. In fact, many of the private responses relayed to me can’t be printed here, as some cable people were downright peeved that the new show will include “Expo” in the name, and concerned that it will dilute the brand of the SCTE gathering. At the same time, most also realize that the decision wasn’t made in a vacuum, and that the industry’s higher-ups obviously saw a good reason to make the change and to broaden the scope of the annual confab. And it's going to take some time before the new name and moniker sinks in...a number of showgoers I talked to couldn't recall the call letters of the newly-named event, but did toss out that it reminded them of this once-popular band.

And the public comments about the change in The Cable Show’s name were about as diplomatic as one might expect.  In comments made at this week’s Chairman’s reception at Cable-Tec Expo, Terry Cordova, the executive vice president and chief technology officer of Suddenlink Communications and the recently re-elected chairman of the SCTE board, offered assurances to those gathered that there are absolutely no plans underway to combine the two shows.

In an interview heading into the show, Mark Dzuban, SCTE’s president and CEO, said he had no issue with the new show using “Expo” in its name, noting that it’s a generic enough term that is used for a lot of trade shows, and that the goals and the scopes of the two annual events are so distinct that it shouldn’t be a problem.

While INTX places a focus on legal, regulatory and policy, with new technology and services mixed in, Cable-Tec Expo  differentiates with its education and training slate and its focus on applied sciences, or “where the rubber meets the road,” as Dzuban puts it.

“They show some of the cool, front end forward-looking stuff and we show what it takes to actually execute and operate. It’s actually very complementary once you think about it,” Dzuban said.

I’d counter that Expo, when uttered in cable circles, has always meant Cable-Tec Expo. Now it could mean something else and be open to market confusion. But it’s early…we’ll have to how the market reacts to the change next year and if some of the knee-jerk reactions are unwarranted.

So, that’s a boiled down view of the big topics and what else was buzzing this week in Denver. But there was lots more going on. Please visit our SCTE Cable-Tec Expo micro-site for an in-depth rundown of what made news this week.

A concentration on new cutting-edge cable technologies, an increased focus on education and the debut of several cable new exhibitors helped drive attendance at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers 2014 Cable-Tec Expo in Denver.

The annual technology fest, held from Sept.22-25, attracted about 9,100 attendees, the SCTE said in a statement. While that was below the 9,800 attendees to the 2013 gathering in Atlanta, a 22% increase in new exhibitors helped drive total booth takers to 376 and a pre-conference symposium on DOCSIS 3.1 and wireless technologies drew more than 500 attendees for the first time. Both the exhibitor and attendance totals represent increases over those registered in 2009, when Denver last played host to the event.

This year’s get-together also had a new focus on learning and education – the conference agenda included more than 100 hours of workshops and symposiums on three distinct tracks: Next-Generation Customer Experience; Next-Generation Video; and Next-Generation Networks.  A standing-room only crowd heard Comcast executive vice president and chief network officer John Schanz keynote the Energy 2020 session that unveiled cable’s plan to reduce energy consumption and assure energy availability by the end of the decade. The event also saw strong attendance at back-to-back sessions on DevOps, Agile Software Development and RDK.

Cable executives provided insights at the general sessions into how the industry is adapting to continue to improve the customer experience and maintain its competitive edge worldwide, and how engineering and operations professional can align their careers.  The sessions included opening remarks by Tony Werner, executive vice president and CTO of Comcast Cable Communications and the 2014 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo Program Chair; a keynote presentation by Rob Lloyd, president, development and sales for Cisco Systems, Inc.; a panel on cloud technologies; a Werner conversation with Mike Fries, president and CEO of Liberty Global; and views on career growth from Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Video Software and Solutions Group, Cisco, and Mike LaJoie, executive vice president and CTO and chief network operations officer for Time Warner Cable.

“Despite unavoidable proximity to IBC and other industry events, the cable engineering community turned out in force to learn more about harnessing the new technologies that increase and ensure service availability,” said SCTE president and CEO Mark Dzuban in a statement.  “We’re grateful for the leadership of Tony Werner; the insights of Mike Fries, Rob Lloyd and our other speakers; the support of CableLabs at our DOCSIS 3.1 and Wireless symposium; and the technical resources of Comcast’s Denver Central operations. All of them—and many others—contributed to making SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2014 the most successful educational event in our history.”

SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2015 will be conducted Tuesday through Friday, Oct. 13-16 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Liberty Global executive vice president and CTO Balan Nair will serve as Program Committee chairman for the 2015 event.

DENVER – SCTE Cable-Tec Expo -- Greg Babinski, a system technician with Bright House Networks in New Port Richey, Fla., outpaced a field of 30 competitors here to take down the 2014 SCTE International Cable-Tec Games title.

Babinski (photo courtesy of SCTE), winner of the 24th-annual International Games on Tuesday (September 23), took on competitors from around the world in a series of seven events that tested specific skills, including fiber and cable splicing, and how well they knew their cable lore.  

Babinski, representing SCTE Region 9 and the SCTE Central Florida Chapter, has been an SCTE member since 2006.

Last year’s champion, Greg Brakefield of Comporium in Rock Hill, S.C. (SCTE Piedmont Chapter/SCTE Region 10), took second. TJ Diplacido of Charter Communications in Fort Worth, Texas (SCTE North Central Texas Chapter/SCTE Region 4), was third.

SCTE also announced the first-place winners of the International Games’ seven individual contests:

-Drop Connection: Joe Cannons, Time Warner Cable, Austin, Texas, SCTE Hill Country Chapter (Region 4)

-Cable Splicing: Bob Colwell, Comcast, Portsmouth, N.H., SCTE New England Chapter (Region 12)

-Fiber Splicing: TJ Diplacido

-MTDR: Greg Babinski

-OTDR: Greg Babinski

-Meter Reading: Greg Brakefield

-Cable Jeopardy: Matt Maddock, Comcast, Centennial, Colo., SCTE Rocky Mountain Chapter (Region 2)

SCTE said Chris Miranda of Comcast in Livermore, Calif., was named the recipient of the fourth annual Spirit of the Games Award. Presented in memory of Mr. David Jones, this award recognizes an individual who best exhibits sportsmanship in the SCTE Cable-Tec Games and embraces the learning environment of the Games.

DENVER – SCTE Cable-Tec Expo – The Reference Design Kit (RDK), a preintegrated software stack originally developed for video set-tops and client devices, is making progress on a new front that will add DOCSIS -powered modems and all-service gateways to the product mix.

Progress of that broadband-encompassing work – commonly referred to as “RDK-B” – is evident here at this weeks’ show, inching the cable industry closer to the creation of a common software layer that can be applied not just to set-tops, but to a multitude of consumer premises equipment product types. The additional broadband component will stitch together a uniform software stack that can help operators and their vendor partners simplify and accelerate product development.

On the product front, Comcast and Arris announced Wednesday that they will collaborate on a trial of a broadband-enabled version of the RDK running on the new Arris Touchstone TG1682 DOCSIS 3.0 Voice Gateway in the fourth quarter of 2014. General availability is slated for the first quarter of 2015.

In some ways, the emergence of RDK-B demonstrates the value of the RDK platform’s openness, to the point that vendors will end up using code that is contributed by competing suppliers. In the case of the Arris gateway that Comcast is about to trial, it will be outfitted with CPE routing software that Cisco Systems contributed to the RDK community on an open-source basis back in April 2014.

The emergence of RDK-B and the use of contributed code is “playing out some of the value proposition of the RDK,” Matt Zelesko, senior vice president, Converged Technology Group, at Time Warner Cable, said here Wednesday on a panel dedicated to RDK developments.

Creating a software stack that relies on common components will eliminate the troublesome task of having to conduct tests and trials of duplicative stacks that are all trying to do the same thing, Zelesko added.

While RDK-B solves some problems, it won’t solve them all. RDK, in general, “is not a panacea to all device problems; it’s not a magical cure-all for managing CPE in this new age,” Zelesko said, noting that it does leave operators with the flexibility to innovate in other areas, including the user interface.

Expanded coverage of the panel, which included an RDK deployment update from TWC, Comcast and Liberty Global, will be featured in the Thursday edition of the Multichannel News SCTE Cable-Tec Expo daily. For more news and announcements from this week’s show, please visit our Expo micro-site.

DENVER -- SCTE Cable-Tec Expo -- Liberty Global faces different competitive pressures in Europe and other parts of the world than some of its U.S. MSO peers, but the need to achieve scale across the board is critical for the entire cable industry, Mike Fries, Liberty Global’s president and CEO, said here during Wednesday’s opening general session.

The need for scale has “never been more important than right now, and will only become more important,” Fries said during a keynote discussion with Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, and the program chairman for this year’s show.

One area where Liberty Global and other MSOs can achieve scale is at the set-top box, and particularly around the Reference Design Kit (RDK), the preintegrated software stack for IP-capable devices that’s being managed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global.

“The RDK is a DOCSIS moment, in our view,” Fries said, referencing the CableLabs-driven DOCSIS specs that has helped cable to achieve massive scale on the broadband end of the business. Liberty Global, by the way, is basing the next-generation of its Horizon video platform on the RDK.

“Horizon, for us, is a game-changer,” he said. On the set-top end, Liberty Global, Fries said, launched an “e-auction” on Wednesday that aims to produce devices that are cheaper and lighter than today’s products and to take advantage of the migration of services to the proverbial cloud.

Fries said scale is also key as cable faces off with “hyper-giants” like Google and Netflix, which is aggressively expanding its subscription video streaming services across many regions of Europe.

Fries also reiterated his stance that the rise of Netflix has prodded the cable industry to move faster and embrace over-the-top video services.

“Netflix taught us a great lesson,” Fries said, noting that cable already had the connectivity and the content. “All we were missing was the app…the user experience.”

To match up, Liberty Global has launched its own over-the-top subscription video service, called My Prime. “We might launch a YouTube channel,” Fries said.

Expanded coverage of Fries' keynote, including his sizing up of the competitive landscape and Liberty Global's wireless and mobile strategies, will be featured in Thursday's Multichannel News SCTE Cable-Tec Expo show daily. For more Expo news and announcements, please visit our show micro-site.

Denver – Cable Tec-Expo – Balan Nair, the executive vice president and chief technology officer of Liberty Global, has been tapped to serve as the program committee chairman for the 2015 Cable-Tec Expo, set to run from October 13-16 in New Orleans.

In that role, Nair will play a central role in programming the event, including the development of educational content the subject matter for the pre-conference symposium on Oct. 13. Nair will also take on the task as the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers looks to expand its international scope, including the recent creation of the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE), a brand and program that aims to globalize and unify SCTE’s training and certification resources.

Nair succeeds Tony Werner, the EVP and CTO of Comcast Cable, as program committee chairman.

“Balan Nair and Liberty Global have been unparalleled in spearheading the internationalization of cable technology,” said Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE, in a statement. “His experiences in the global marketplace will bring a unique perspective that will help us to grow the value of SCTE Cable-Tec Expo for the cable industry in the United States and abroad.”

“The educational resources of SCTE and the thought leadership of SCTE Cable-Tec Expo are accelerating the advancement of cable knowledge worldwide,” added Nair. “A key objective of the Cable-Tec Expo 2015 Program Committee will be to identify the technologies that will take cable into the future, and to create an agenda that prepares our industry to maximize the value of the changes ahead.”

Liberty Global, an operator that serves 47 million homes worldwide, is a member of SCTE’s Corporate Alliance Program, an initiative launched in April that provides additional training and education tools to operator and vendor partners and aims to boost the society’s membership base.

Pace is using this week’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver to springboard a range of new DOCSIS 3.0-powered gateways, including a high-end “Ultra” model that can bond up to 24 downstream channels – enough to support bursts of 960 Mbps on cable systems that use 6 MHz-wide channels.

The new line of products, which are based on Broadcom silicon, also bake in dual-band 802.11n (2.4 GHz) and 802.11ac (5 GHz) functionality.

Here’s a snapshot of the models that Pace is debuting this week:

-D5001 Ultra Gateway – D3 gateway (24x8 channel configuration), with MoCA 2.0, and dual band 802.11 n/ac.     

-D3001 Max Gateway – D3 gateway (16x4), with MoCA 2.0, and dual band 802.11 n/ac.     

-D3003 Advanced Gateway – D3 gateway (16x4) with dual band 802.11 n/ac.  

Pace, which will compete in the gateway market against vendors such as Arris, Hitron, Cisco Systems and Netgear, said the full line is compatible with TiVo systems and integrated into Pace’s Whole Home architecture, which features the MG1 Multi-tuner Video Gateway and Mi3 client devices. The models also feature TR-069 and SNMPv3 for remote management.

“As a strategic partner of Pace for many years, we are very proud to be supporting them as they enter this sector of the market,” said Jay Kirchoff, VP of marketing, cable broadband at Broadcom. “With this range of products utilizing Broadcom silicon for DOCSIS, Wi-Fi and MoCA, Pace has created a very powerful gateway proposition for the cable industry.”

Pace said customer testing is underway with select, still-unnamed MSOs in North America, noting that the set of products will be ready for commercial field deployment in November. Further variants of the range will follow in 2015, the company said.

This Technology, a provider of dynamic ad insertion and alternate content software, has launched the Congruity Intelligent Signal Processor, a system designed to manage SCTE-35 cues for all delivery platforms.

The new, cloud-based software product normalizes the wide variances of SCTE-35 messages MVPDs receive from programmers, the company said.

 SCTE-35 is a standard to signal an ad insertion opportunity in a transport stream, but variances in usage of SCTE-35 messages has exceeded the standard due to usage for advertising, regionalization and measurement across both adaptive bit rate and digital TV, for video on demand, cloud-based DVR and linear viewing, This Technology said.

That means every programmer uses SCTE-35 differently, requiring MVPDs to standardize the messages for their internal infrastructure.

"As programmers enable the next generation of television, consistent practice for SCTE-35 formatting is lacking, which challenges MVPDs who have to adjust for this disparity," said Denise MacDonell, vice president of product management and marketing for This Technology, in a statement.

Features of Congruity include signal processing, Web-based configuration and provisioning, and data storage.

This Technology’s announced customers include Comcast, Verizon Communications, NBCUniversal, and ABC. In February, Canoe, the advanced advertising J.V. backed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks, certified This Technology’s metadata asset management platform.

If good things indeed come in small packages, Casa Systems (booth 1739) is testing out that axiom at this week’s Cable-Tec Expo with the launch of the C40G, a compact version of its integrated converged cable access platform (CCAP) that packs in support for MPEG video, IP video and DOCSIS over a single port.

Casa, which has been gaining ground on cable access market leaders Arris and Cisco Systems, claims that the C40G supports the same functionality of its larger integrated CCAP cousin, the C100G.

According to Casa, the C40G platform utilizes all of the existing C100G CCAP modules including: the downstream module (DS8X96); switching module (SMM8X10G); and upstream modules (US16X4 & 16X8)

“With the announcement of the C40G, Casa Systems is the first vendor to provide an extremely cost effective and highly economical CCAP platform for those operators who have smaller headends,” said Jeff Heynen, principal analyst of broadband access and pay TV for Infonetics Research, in a statement.

Denver--The cable industry must be ready to change and evolve its development models and accelerate its pace of innovation if it is to be prepared to fend off heated competition that’s coming from multiple fronts, including from Web- and cloud-focused online video rivals.

That was a key theme presented during Tuesday morning’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo opening general session, which that featured keynote presentations and a panel on how cable is evolving to a more cloud-centric, agile model of engineering and product development.

Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s executive vice president and chief technology officer and the program chairman of this year’s show, summed it all up with this terse phrase: “Shifts happen.”

“We are at a time of great change,” said Werner, who gave some credit to Mike LaJoie, the retiring chief technology officer of Time Warner Cable, for coming up with a term to help put everything into perspective. “We are facing a new wave of competition.”

The good news, is that the cable industry “has been built on change,” Werner said. For example, he noted how channel counts have climbed from the single digits to the hundreds and that the industry is already moving toward an IP-, cloud-based service development and delivery approach.

To handle the competition and to ensure that the industry can pivot quickly, he said cable must focus on three key areas: product, improving customer service, and leveraging scale and technology.

On the product side, cable must start to sweat the details, and not rely on off-the-shelf offerings, but on products that tie in impressive industrial design and packaging. If content is king, rich navigation with content curation and recommendation engines are now “queen,” he said.

And cable can no longer lean solely on triple-play bundles, but must continue to introduce new growth-stoking services. Among examples, Xfinity Home, Comcast’s home automation and security service, “has shown promise,” Werner said, noting that almost half of those customers are new to Comcast, and about 54% now take four services.

Werner acknowledged that cable has a long way to go when it comes to maintaining customer loyalty as competition grows more heated and consumers now expect the kind of bar-raising experience delivered by companies such as Amazon, Zappos and Uber. “We haven’t lived up to the old bar,” he said.

On the scale front, he said it’s “critical” for cable to continue to leverage industry organizations such as CableLabs, CTAM, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers.

And he said the industry should embrace platforms such as the Reference Design Kit (RDK), plugging the open, pre-integrated software stack being managed by Comcast, TWC and Liberty Global.

Werner and a follow up panel took it all as step further by diving into cable’s increased use of the proverbial cloud, open architectures, and the adoption of the “agile” development model and “DevOps” — ensuring that development and operations teams are working together.

Agile development, Werner said, “takes years out of the process.”

Cloud technologies, when linked to agile and DevOps modeling, is disrupting the way the industry operates, but in a good way, executives said in a follow up panel.

At the app level, it allows operators to deploy services and try out new things at a more rapid pace. “What we need is decision-making that can keep up with the technology,” Geoff Arnold, cloud architect at Cisco Systems, said.

The cloud “is not the tool itself, but the process it enables,” Nick Barcet, vice president of products and presales for eNovance/Red Hat, added.

Shifting operations into the cloud and putting the development and operations teams on the same page “removes a lot of friction from the process,” Mark Muehl, Comcast’s senior vice president, platform technologies, said.

Rob Lloyd, president of development and sales and Cisco, amplified those points in his following cloud-focused keynote.

 “We need to pick up the pace of innovation,” Lloyd said.

One way cable can quicken its gait by continuing to put more service smarts in the cloud that can manage and optimize millions of client devices.

That doesn’t mean the client device will disappear. Devices in the home will continue to serve as the model for innovation, Lloyd said, but “home devices [are becoming] a little thinner.”

Led off by high-profile projects such as DOCSIS 3.1, CableLabs, the industry’s interoperability specifications specialist and general research-and-development house, has its hands full keeping an eye on what’s important now and what might be on the horizon — a horizon that includes fiber-to-the-home technologies and cable’s expanding and evolving WiFi strategies.

Phil McKinney, the former Hewlett-Packard exec who took the helm of CableLabs in June 2012, recently caught up with Multichannel News to talk about his organization’s priorities, initiatives and concerns. An edited transcript follows.

SCTE Daily: The cable industry has plenty on its plate these days, but what are your top priorities? these days?

Phil McKinney: The top three priorities [are] around the three projects or focus areas of our R&D area, which is wireline broadband services, which is really DOCSIS 3.1, making sure we continue to push that forward and get that ready with the vendor and member community and getting that deployed.

Second is wireless, and that includes WiFi and our work in LTE Unlicensed and the work we’ve been leading in the U.S. and now around the world on additional unlicensed spectrum policy.

The third is cybersecurity. It’s growing as the priority for anybody in the broadband space, but one that CableLabs has been involved in, given our security posture and role that CableLabs today plays in running and managing the PKI (public key infrastructure) keys for the cable industry. We’re expanding that and developing innovations and technologies around cybersecurity, identity protection for cable customers, given just the footprint cable provides for both consumers and corporations with broadband services and how do you protect those customers from the threats that are coming in through that broadband connection.

SCTE Daily: What’s next for CableLabs on the PKI front? [Of recent note, CableLabs formed a for-profit venture called NetworkFX in 2012.]

PM: We manage north of 300 million PKI keys on behalf of the industry. We actually distribute and manage the root keys and design the keys — every set-top box, every modem … has the keys.

What can we do on top of having this secure posture already into the network [is] do things like better identity management and identity protection. We know, for example, who is sitting behind a DOCSIS modem, we know you’re physically in your house so you can take a certain model of identity and do more things, say your financial institution, than maybe you would do sitting at a WiFi hotspot sitting at a Starbucks.

SCTE Daily: CableLabs published the initial DOCSIS 3.1 product specs about a year ago. What progress has the consortium made on the 3.1 specs this year?

PM: Right now, silicon vendors are building the chips; the first chips we’re anticipating toward the end of this year. You’ll see interops in the first half of 2015 and certification in that early part of mid-2015. Then, you’ll start to see physical deployments by the end of 2015 on the current schedule, which is slightly ahead of the original schedule that we laid out two years ago when we kicked off 3.1 activities.

Every time I have a conversation with any of the CEOs, typically the first part of the conversation is not about the weather; it’s about the status of DOCSIS 3.1.

SCTE Daily: How imperative is it for cable to get 1 Gigabit-per-second services rolled out amid the emerging threat of Google Fiber and projects like AT&T’s GigaPower?

PM: The question we always get is, “What the heck do you do once you get 1-Gig into a house? What service requires it?”

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.

SCTE Daily: CableLabs has also been active with fiber-to-the-premises technology, including a way to bring DOCSIS-style provisioning to GPON and EPON. Why is FTTP important to the industry when DOCSIS 3.1 on the way?

PM: Today, if you’re doing a greenfield deployment, what would you put in the ground? You’d put fiber.

Part of the challenge I’ve had inside the industry when I came into cable was that when you think of the word cable, everyone assumes it’s coax and only coax. A better word for the industry would be the “broadband” industry. It doesn’t matter if it’s coax or cable or WiFi. However, it’s about delivering those broadband services to the customer. The cable operators are really agnostic.

But if you’re going to extend your network and open up a trench, you’re going to put fiber in that trench today. Some operators are going with an EPON [Ethernet passive optical network] approach and others are going with a GPON [Gigabit passive optical network] approach. We’re working on a project called “OnePON” that is really trying to rationalize IEEE and ITU [standards] and bring them together for a single PON approach versus the EPON and GPON camps. The jury is still out whether we’re going to be able to bring the two camps together. But we think it’s important enough to put a stake in the ground and at least try.

SCTE Daily: How is LTE Unlicensed factoring into your work around WiFi?

PM: With LTE Unlicensed, it’s about expanding the use of LTE. You can take LTE Unlicensed and use the same [unlicensed] bands that WiFi uses. LTE doesn’t have restrictions. However, there are some challenges. LTE today assumes that it has exclusive use to the broadband — that channel — because it operates in a licensed band today. It doesn’t have to think about sharing.

As soon as you move it into unlicensed, it has to share. It has to know how to share. That becomes the challenge today.  If you took LTE and run it in the unlicensed band today, it would basically dominate everything in the spectrum and knock WiFi out.

CableLabs is working with the LTE industry and the WiFi industry … on proposals and technical approaches on how to do better spectrum sharing. Spectrum is not an unlimited resource.

Jamie Griffin of Full Channel Inc. prevailed over eight other contestants to win the 2014 SCTE IP Challenge, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers said at Denver's SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.

Griffin, of Barrington, R.I., is director of technology with Full Channel. He has been an SCTE member since 2009.

Sponsored by Cisco, SCTE IP Challenge 2014 began with virtual qualifying rounds conducted in recent months leading up to Monday evening’s live finals competition at Expo. The finals provided the nine finalists with an opportunity to compete in a blended-style Jeopardy match that included traditional questions, router and CMTS configuration, and hands-on activities. The SCTE IP Challenge was created to drive awareness among the SCTE membership of the importance of foundational Internet Protocol knowledge. The event, now in its fourth year, has served to promote interest around the benefits of IP to the cable industry, SCTE said.

“SCTE thanks Cisco for sponsoring such spirited competition this evening in Denver and throughout the 2014 SCTE IP Challenge season,” SCTE Senior Director of Advanced Network Technologies Steve Harris said in a release. “We look forward to another fine IP Challenge in 2015 and anticipate a record level of participation.”

The eight other finalists who qualified for and competed at this year’s Expo were Kenneth Corbett of Charter Communications, Robert Greenland of Suddenlink Communications, Brian Hamrick of Comcast Cable (pictured in foreground), John Holt of Time Warner Cable, Mark McNiff of Comcast Cable, Chris Miranda of Comcast Cable, Brian Parker of Charter Communications and Younes Zarrouki of Comcast Cable.

DENVER – Cable-Tec Expo -- The cable industry introduced “Gigasphere” as the consumer-facing brand for DOCSIS 3.1 at The Cable Show in April, and now it has a logo to go with it.

Mark Dzuban, the president and CEO of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, flashed the logo during Tuesday’s opening session. I was not quick enough on the draw to take a snap, but an official with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association was kind enough to slip us a copy.

So, feast your eyes.

As a reminder , the NCTA, in collaboration with the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM), CableLabs and Cable Europe, teamed on the brand, which is emerging as cable operators start to prep for DOCSIS 3.1, a platform that promises to deliver 1-Gig speeds on a broad basis.

Here on Monday, CableLabs director of network technologies Belal Hamzeh said initial plugfests and interoperability tests are slated to be underway by December, with official certification and qualification against the DOCSIS 3.1 specs expected to be underewaay as early as the second quarter of 2015.

The Comcast Wholesale unit of Comcast Cable said it has developed a new way to insert ads into both linear and video-on-demand programming by integrating the workflows of its Comcast AdDelivery and VOD aggregation and delivering platforms.

The new set-up allows advertisers, their agencies, and creative shops to manage cross-platform advertising campaigns running in prior episodes of TV series that may be viewed via VOD as well using a single cloud-based web portal, the company said.

“Providing a full service solution for digital ad insertion across both linear and on demand is a valuable improvement for television advertising,” said Matt McConnell, SVP and GM of Comcast Wholesale. “This brings the advertising community closer to its vision for an ‘Advertising Everywhere’ ad management solution for reaching TV audiences across all TV and Internet-based platforms and markets.”

The MSO said Comcast AdDelivery currently supports more than 10,000 advertisers, agencies and post houses and distributes spot TV advertising directly into the traffic management systems used by most national and local, cable and broadcast outlets in North America as well as media reached by global ad delivery platforms.  Comcast said its Wholesale unit’s VOD platform currently distributed more than 20,000 hours of programming for more than 275 content providers.

Rovi said it has deployed guides on more than 500,000 digital terminal adapters (DTAs), the simple, one-way channel zappers that operators around the world are using to help fuel their all-digital migrations.

Rovi said it eclipsed the milestone following commercial deployments with more than a dozen cable operators, including Armstrong and Cablevision Argentina and via collaborations with several DTA makers, including Arris, Evolution Digital and Pace. In April, Rovi announced it had secured a hunting license to sell DTA guides to members of the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC).

DTAs serve as digital-to-analog converters for older analog TVs. While initial models did nothing more than switch channels, new models now support HD video as well as guides such as Rovi’s.

The Rovi DTA Guide supports baseline navigation capabilities, including channel tuning, parental controls, options for multiple languages, and on-screen On Now/On Next banners.

“Based on planned additional customer launches and new agreements, we look forward to bringing our guide solutions to more subscribers and, broadly, fueling the overall market’s transition to an all-digital footprint,” Rovi SVP Omar Javaid said, in a statement.

Rovi (booth 1942) is demonstrating its DTA guides at this week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver.

Cisco Systems has rolled out a new line card upgrade for its flagship UBR10012 cable modem termination system that shoots for downstream speeds of more than 1 Gigabit per second by enabling the bonding of up to 32 DOCSIS 3.0 channels.

At its full potential, a D3 modem that can bond 32 6MHz-wide channels can pump out bursts of about 1.2 Gbps in North American DOCSIS environments, and up to 1.6 Gbps  EuroDOCSIS networks that use 8MHz-wide channels.

Cisco is enabling the new bonding feat on its new 6 Gigabit Shared Port Adapter (6G SPA), billed as software upgrade of its 3G SPA card for the uBR10K. The enhancement boosts the number of downstream channels available for the CMTS from 1,152 to 1,728 in the same amount of rack space, Cisco said, noting that up to eight SPA line cards can be used per uBR10K CMTS. Each 6G SPA card can also support up to 144 downstream licensed per card, for a total of 1,152 6G SPA downstream channels per chassis.

Cisco, which announced the upgrade at this week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo  in Denver, said it will kick off trials of the 6G SPA capabilities with several MSOs around the globe “over the next few months.”

Cisco announced the upgrade amid new chips from Broadcom and Intel that can bond 32 DOCSIS 3.0 downstream channels. They, along with STMicroelectronics, are also developing silicon for DOCSIS 3.1, an emerging CableLabs platform that is targeting multi-Gigabit capabilities.

Denver – SCTE Cable-Tec Expo -- The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers announced Monday that Terry Cordova, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Suddenlink Communications, has been re-elected as chairman of the board for the upcoming 2014-2015 term.

At a meeting here at the show, the board also elected a full slate of officers for the coming year, with Cordova being joined on the  2014/2015 SCTE board’s Executive Committee by:

-Vice Chairman: Tony Werner, executive vice president and CTO, Comcast Cable;
-Treasurer: Christine Whitaker, group vice president and Chief Learning Officer, Time Warner Cable; and
-Secretary: Nick Segura, manager of network engineering, Charter Communications.

According to SCTE, Bill Warga, vice president, technology and a member of the Chief Architecture Group for Liberty Global, has been appointed to replace Mike LaJoie, the executive vice president and CTO of Time Warner Cable, on the SCTE board. In June, LaJoie announced that he plans to retire from TWC at the end of the year.

“The SCTE Board of Directors’ commitment and guidance are reflected in the creation of our Corporate Alliance and Energy 2020 programs, our new international presence and a surge in activity at the chapter level,” said Mark Dzuban president and CEO of SCTE, in a statement. “I’d like to thank Mike LaJoie and our outgoing secretary, Jim Hughes, for their tireless support, and to welcome Bill Warga to the Board. I look forward to working with Terry Cordova, the rest of the Executive Committee and the entire Board of Directors as we expand the size and scope of our contributions to the industry in the year ahead.”

The 2014-2015 SCTE Board of Directors conducted its first board meeting today following the election of its officers Denver.

Please visit our Cable-Tec Expo micro-site for more news and announcements from this week’s annual tech-fest in Denver.

Nothing like back-to-back trade shows to kick in the jargon engines!

First up was IBC in Amsterdam last week; the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo hits Denver this week.

Three terms popped up with amusing regularity at IBC: “Workflow,” “cloud,” and “virtualization.” Translations follow.

Examples, from piles of notes: Workflows can be 4K, file-based, and complex. Workflows in production and distribution are changing because the video content lifecycle is changing, one IBC session aspired to explain. “Build a future-proof media production workflow,” another hawked.

Translation: A “workflow” is telco- and IT-speak for a business policy that needs to be teased out (with an API!) of its legacy (old fart) bindings, then recombined, as a spew of data recognizable by other spews of data (sister API!), to do its intention. Turn it on, turn it off. Encrypt it, decrypt it. Code it, transcode it, decode it.

“Cloud,” as it relates to the non-atmospheric, needs an immediate and explicitly silent sabbatical of an indeterminate length. We will happily contribute to that here.

Which brings us to “virtualization.” Always just like that, wrapped in quote marks on the page, and spoken with accompanying air squiggles.

Here’s what’s going on with “virtualization.” Everything in our digital lives that was purpose-built is at a brink. Depending on the point of view, the camera that is just a camera, nothing else, or the phone that is just a phone, nothing else, might be on the endangered species list. Why? Because it becomes a feature, and not just in your phone or tablet. It gets virtualized.

But, if your digital life is like mine, your phone’s camera is already better than your regular camera (which you think might be in the garage somewhere), and your phone’s phone is a pretty crappy experience.

So, in one sense, “virtualization” unleashes a potential software renaissance for the core workings of our digital stuff, to trick things out with a continuously improving webbing of software-created accoutrements.

In another sense, “virtualization” casts some of the stuff in our gadget gardens into the digital doldrums. A digital doldrum device is anything you still own, but don’t use because you can’t find the charger, Bluetooth-to-USB dongleor other mission-critical thingie.

Ultimately, the answer depends on the degree of usefulness of the potential accoutrements of the renaissance.

Either way, it’s coming. Because to virtualize is to gear up to work at “Web speed,” like all companies “born on broadband” (name any over-the-top provider of anything) already do.

Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.

DENVER – SCTE Cable-Tec Expo -- CableLabs is making progress on test plans and equipment “plugfests” for DOCSIS 3.1 that will lead the way to official product certifications and qualification testing in the first half of 2015.

CableLabs is developing DOCSIS 3.1 test plans now, with the first plugfests and interoperability tests slated for this December, Belal Hamzeh, the director of network technologies’ at CableLabs, said Monday during a pre-show Symposium dedicated to DOCSIS 3.1 and WiFi developments.

Hamzeh said official certification and qualification against the DOCSIS 3.1 specs could start as early as the second quarter of 2015. “So far we are on target and the vendors are moving ahead…with products,” Hamzeh said.

The speed of that product development is only being matched by the speeds that DOCSIS 3.1 is designed to support – up to 10 Gigabits per second downstream and at least 1 Gbps in the upstream.

“There hasn’t been any DOCSIS spec that was conceived and developed so fast…as DOCSIS 3.1,” Jorge Salinger, Comcast’s vice president, access architecture, said, noting that the time it will take to get DOCSIS 3.1 initially deployed is poised to take less time than it took to write the specs.

Although products are currently in development, Salinger made the point that most of the work around DOCSIS 3.1 is mostly done, noting that at least three chipmakers – Broadcom, Intel and STMicroelectronics– are building D3.1 silicon. But like it was with DOCSIS 3.0, the emerging platform will see products for the downstream develop faster than the upstream side.

He also expects there to be a small cost delta between DOCSIS 3.0 modems and DOCSIS 3.1 modems, which will be hybrids that can support both DOCSIS 3.0 and DOCSIS 3.1 spectrum to ensure backwards compatibility.  

“It will be a long time before we don’t have any DOCSIS 3.0 modems in the network,” Salinger said, estimating that about half of Comcast’s deployed modems are DOCSIS 3.0, and the other half are DOCSIS 2.0.

That hybrid approach will allow cable operators to seed the market with D3.1-capable modems before they activate DOCSIS 3.1 spectrum, which will be more efficient (up to 50%) thanks to the introduction of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and a new forward error correction technique called low-density parity-check (LDPC).

“It’s a very smooth transition approach,” Salinger said.

More coverage of this panel will be featured in the Multichannel News SCTE Cable-Tec Expo daily distributed here at the show. Please visit our Cable-Tec Expo micro-site for more news and announcements from this week’s show.

Mike Hayashi, a long-time engineering executive with Time Warner Cable who has played an important role in the development of key cable technologies and services, announced that he will retire from the operator by the end of the year.

Hayashi, TWC’s Denver-based executive vice president, architecture, development and engineering, informed colleagues of his decision to retire via internal memos distributed last week.

Hayashi’s coming departure comes as TWC, the nation’s second-largest cable operator, is in the process of being acquired by Comcast, and was announced a little more than three months after Mike LaJoie, TWC’s executive vice president and chief technology and network operations officer, announced that he plans to retire at the end of 2014.

Hayashi, a 36-year cable vet and advanced video pioneer, joined TWC 22 years ago following the merger of ATC and Warner Cable. During his career at TWC, Hayashi has been a force in the development and deployment of next-gen cable services, including advanced analog, digital video, cable telephony, and video-on-demand, and has also been instrumental in the development of CableLabs-led initiatives such as OpenCable.

Hayashi told colleagues that he has “every bit of confidence in the succession organization I’ve put in place,” noting that Howard Pfeffer, TWC’s senior vice president of broadband technology; and Matt Zelesko, senior vice president of TWC’s Converged Technology Group, “will continue to lead a team of world-class developers and architects.”

“When I joined TWC, my goal was to return to technology development within three years so that I could contribute to the creation of a better set-top box. As it turns out, I’m about 19 years late on fulfilling that goal,” Hayashi told colleagues.  

Hayashi also left the door open on where he might go next. “I love this business. I always will,” he wrote. “While I don’t have any concrete plans at the moment, I will continue to stay connected to the industry and keep my options open. And, through my last day with TWC on December 31, 2014, I remain committed to helping with merger integration efforts.”

“Mike plans to stay active in the cable industry post-retirement, and I look forward to seeing how he’ll continue to change it for the better,” LaJoie said in a separate internal announcement. “I’m honored to have worked with Mike over the years and I feel lucky to have had a front-row seat to his impressive career.”

Hayashi, a graduate of St. Joseph College in in Yokohama, Japan, and Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., started his cable career at Pioneer Communications of America as staff engineer for Warner Cable’s pioneering Qube project. He later joined Scientific-Atlanta (now part of Cisco), where he developed requirements for the first integrated electronic program guide and helped the company enter international markets such as the United Kingdom and Japan.

Word of Hayashi's coming retirement comes as thousands of cable engineers gather in Denver this week for the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.

Multichannel News has asked TWC for further comment and will update this story accordingly.

Denver – SCTE Cable-Tec Expo -- CableLabs is working with several standards groups on products and tools that will rely on standards and specifications that will enable cable operators and other carriers with the building blocks necessary to develop and manage “carrier-grade” WiFi networks.

The vision, explained Mike Poletti, the lead wireless architect at CableLabs during Monday’s Pre-Conference Symposium here, is to give operators the tools, software and equipment necessary across the WiFi ecosystem to boost the overall, inherent quality of their WiFi networks. 

All of this is coming into play as MSOs around the world continue to build and expand their metro-area WiFi networks. For example, members of the U.S. “Cable WiFi” roaming alliance – Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks ,  have already deployed more than 250,000 hotspots collectively.  On the international front, Comcast and Liberty Global announced a WiFi roaming deal earlier this month.

The need for carrier-grade WiFi will only become more pronounced as those networks are used for an increasing number of bandwidth-eating applications and services. Poletti presented data showing that the number of hotspots deployed worldwide by various carriers will grow from 5.2 million in 2012 to 10.5 million in 2018. Likewise, the amount of data mobile operators offload onto WiFi networks is expected to jump from 22% this year to 48% in 2018, Poletti said.

MSOs, meanwhile, are also developing apps that allow customers to take phone calls on WiFi networks, and consumers are using WiFi to receive streaming video.

CableLabs, Poletti noted, has been looking to meet this coming scale challenge by developing carrier WiFi requirements for several years in tandem with the IEEE, the Wi-Fi Alliance, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance.

The groundwork of that effort includes goals of providing a consistent user experience (good network attachment and maintaining network connection); network management (key metrics and performance indicators); and integrated “end-to-end” networks that support everything from provisioning to managing users when they are connected to the WiFi network.

Poletti noted that some WPA products  that currently comply with carrier-grade components of WiFi, including WiFi Multimedia, a feature that provides quality of service the traffic prioritization procedures for time-sensitive apps  that require low tolerance and network latency, such as video.  Another is Hotspot 2.0-/Passpoint, which allows client devices to auto-discover and connect to WiFi networks that support roaming agreements without requiring the user to manually input credentials. Time Warner Cable is an early proponent of Hotspot 2.0, which brings cellular-like, seamless connectivity features and enhanced security components to WiFi.

Carrier WiFi features under development include RF Performance criteria and limits to enable WiFi operators to support “link budgets” that can be factored into network planning; Multi-Band Selection, which defined requirements  for an access point to steer a client device to uncongested bands and channels; and a faster way (from more than 1 second today to hundreds of milliseconds) for devices to transition and re-authenticate across different access points.

The vision behind Carrier WiFi “is gaining traction and becoming more and more real,” Poletti said, noting that leading groups are expected to move ahead with certification testing in 2015 or 2016. The pace of pursuit is “pretty fast for standards bodies,” he said.

This week’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver is shaping up to be an engineer’s delight as sessions and workshops place a fi ne technical focus on DOCSIS 3.1, energy management, software-defined networking, the proverbial “cloud,” the evolution of cable’s WiFi strategy, and 4K/Ultra HD and other next-gen video services.

While that offers a patchwork of key topics and trends, a common, thematic thread will hold them all together — improving the customer experience, Mark Dzuban, the president and CEO of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, said.

“If we look at last year’s Expo being about IP networking and going to all-IP networks and what that technical evolution looks like, this year it’s really about how do we use science and technology to improve the customer experience in a market that is very competitive, but so are we,” Dzuban said, noting that the event will play host to 48 workshops.

And expect a look into the cloud that doesn’t just skim along the surface of what’s evolved into a catch-all buzzword. “We’re not talking about Wikipedia: What is the cloud?” Dzuban said. “This is about how to apply dos and don’ts and best practices.”

This year’s event will also take on more global proportions, mirroring a broader trend that is seeing the cable industry coalesce around standards and technologies on a worldwide scale.

That broader focus should help this year’s Cable-Tec Expo match (or come close to matching) the attendance at last year’s event in Atlanta. Yes, fl at is indeed the new growth.

And it helps that Denver, despite no longer being the Cable Capital of the World, is still a cable town.

“Historically, Denver has had strong on-site registrations,” Dzuban said. “We expect to be where we were last year. But some of that is factored into the on-site registrations we’re expecting.”

For those keeping score, last year’s Expo in Atlanta drew about 9,800, a 6% increase from the 2012 event in steamy Orlando, Fla.

Outside of attendance, Cable-Tec Expo is seeing growth in other areas. Dzuban said the number of new, fi rst-time exhibitors is up 64% for the Denver event, while total exhibitors are up roughly 16%. SCTE, he said, is also seeing a surge in international attendance, which was up 10% heading into this week’s event.

That growth comes against the backdrop of SCTE’s broader global focus. Earlier this month, for example, the SCTE launched the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE), a brand and education division that will supply training and certification resources around the world. It’s also there to “eliminate existing brand confusion” with the Society for Broadband Professionals, a U.K.-based group founded in 1945 that also goes by “SCTE.”

SCTE, like other cable-focused organizations, has been tasked with stoking growth strategies in an that is contracting.

“If you look at our mission, the mission doesn’t change” in the face of consolidation, Dzuban said. “It’s expanding our footprint and our relationship with existing MSOs to include — just as CableLabs is absorbing Europe CableLabs and the NCTA [National Cable & Telecommunications Association] having a larger international contingent — the global community.”

But don’t expect Cable Tec-Expo to set up its tent overseas, at least not yet. SCTE has already locked in New Orleans for the site of its 2015 cable tech-fest, set for Oct. 13-16.

What’s on Your Expo Dance Card?

Cable-Tec Expo will again offer a broad mix of bigpicture sessions and nuts-and-bolts workshops that will cover the most important technologies, topics and trends that the industry is facing now and those on the horizon but approaching fast.

With a lot to see and a lot to cover, it will be impossible not to miss some of the important technology beats unless you have a time machine tucked away in your back pocket. By category, here some sessions and workshops that will be on our hit list:

DOCSIS 3.1

Mon., Sept. 22, 1 p.m. (Symposium): “DOCSIS 3.1 Current Status and Schedule,” with Jorge Salinger of Comcast Cable and Belal Hamzeh of CableLabs.

Weds., Sept. 24, 10:45 a.m. (Room 108): “DOCSIS 3.1: Making It Real,” moderated by Jorge Salinger of Comcast, with Dan Torbet of Arris, and Patricio Latini of Intraway.

WiFi

Mon., Sept. 22, 9:15 a.m. (Symposium): “Carrier Grade WiFi,” with Mark Polett i, CableLabs.

Thurs., Sept. 25, 12:45 p.m. (Room 102): “WiFi: The Quest for Quality,” moderated by Raymond Celona of Comcast, with Todd Smith of Comcast and Charles Cheevers of Arris.

Thurs., Sept. 25, 2 p.m. (Room 102): “WiFi in the Connected Home,” moderated by Chris Albano of Comcast, with Chris Cholas of Time Warner Cable and John Anderson of Fluke Networks.

SDN, NFV, RDK and the Internet of Things

Mon., Sept. 22, 2 p.m. (Room 201): “Application of SDN and NFV in the Service Provider Delivery Network,” moderated by Bruce McClelland of Arris, with Adam Dunstan of Active Broadband Networks and Alon Bernstein of Cisco Systems.

Tues., Sept. 23, 9:45 a.m. (Room 102): “Cable’s Internet of Everything,” moderated by Mark Francisco of Comcast, with Mark Tubinis of Savant Systems.

Weds., Sept. 24, 10:45 a.m. (Room 201): “Putt ing DevOps Into Practice: The RDK Model,” moderated by Leslie Ellis of Ellis Edits, a Multichannel News contributor, with Labeeb Ismail of Comcast, Bill Warga of Liberty Global and Matt Zelesko of Time Warner Cable.

Cable’s Power Play

Wed., Sept. 24, 1 p.m. (Room 103): “Energy 2020,” with Comcast’s John Schanz (keynoter), session moderator Theresa Hennesy of Comcast, and Ivan Lamoureux of Suddenlink Communications, Simpson Cumba of Comcast, Derek DiGiacomo of SCTE, John Dolan of Rogers Communications and Dan Cooper of Time Warner Cable.

Arris will use this week’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver to show off features and new wares aimed at helping MSOs get more pop out of their existing hybrid fiber coax networks and extend services to homes using fiber-only architectures.

On the HFC side, Arris said it will demonstrate a DOCSIS 3.1-facing downstream that runs on its flagship E6000 cable modem termination system (CMTS) and utilizes orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), a modulation scheme that is part of the new CableLabs specs. The E6000 is starting out as a high-density CMTS, but will evolve to become a fully-integrated Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) that also builds in the edge QAM function.

According to Todd Kessler, vice president of CMTS/CCAP product management at Arris, the OFDM downstream demo on the E6000 will be run in tandem with new cable modem test boards from two DOCSIS chipmakers – Intel and STMicroelectronics -- and a signal analyzer from Keysight.

Part of the demo, Kessler said, is to show how existing blades on the E6000 can be upgraded to support D3.1-based technology via a firmware upgrade. This is possible, he said, because the E6000 is equipped with customizable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) silicon. 

While that demo is about DOCSIS 3.1, a multi-gigabit platform that’s designed to run on HFC, a new Arris product, called AgileMax, takes aim at RF over Glass (RFoG), a standard that lets cable operators deliver RF-based services , such as video, to the home over fiber but uses the MSO’s legacy backoffice and provisioning systems.

Operators have historically used RFoG in greenfields and for plant extensions in rural areas, with some eyeing it as a migration point toward PON-based FTTP networks. However, scaled rollouts of RFoG have been hindered by the presence of Optical Beat Interference (OBI), which impairs performance when multiple modems try to communicate over the same fiber at the same time. Arris holds that the advent of DOCSIS 3.1 will only exacerbate the issue.

Arris said AgileMax, a product that sits where a fiber splitter would reside on the network (the hub, the basement of a multiple dwelling unit, fiber cabinet or node, etc.), mitigates OBI by supporting split ratios and data rates that have previously been unachievable.

Arris, which views current OBI-inhibitors as temporary and operationally complex, expects trials of AgileMax to start in the fourth quarter of 2014, with full rollouts anticipated next year, according to Ray Bontempi, Arris’s vice president of product management.

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.  

This year’s Cable-Tec Expo in the Mile High City will be flush with big picture-focused opening sessions and drill-it-down engineering workshops that will cover the gamut when it comes to what is important in the here-and-now and what’s on the horizon, but coming up fast.

That means the show will be covering everything from cable’s Internet-protocol video migration, the emergence of DOCSIS 3.1, the industry’s evolving WiFi strategies, cable’s energy-management initiatives, making sense of the so-called “Internet of Things,” and everything in between.

Unless you have a time machine tucked away in your back pocket, it’ll be impossible to be everywhere at once and not miss any of the important technology beats. We’ve spent some time poring over what’s on tap in Denver and have boiled down some of the sessions and workshops that will be on our hit list.

DOCSIS 3.1

There’s plenty from which to choose from on DOCSIS 3.1, the budding platform that is promising to deliver wide-scale multi-gigabit capacities without having to pull fiber all the way to the premises.

There will be plenty of nuts and bolts to chew on Monday (Sept. 22) during the pre-show DOCSIS 3.1 and Wireless symposium, but this one is shaping up to be an important, sure-fire hit:

1 p.m-1:30 p.m.: “DOCSIS 3.1 Current Status and Schedule,” with Jorge Salinger of Comcast Cable; and Belal Hamzeh of CableLabs.

Other DOCSIS 3.1-facing sessions on the dance card:

Tuesday, Sept. 23 at 9:45 a.m.: “Peeling Back the Layers of DOCSIS 3.1” (Room 108), moderated by Ralph Brown of CableLabs, with Richard Prodan of Broadcom, and Ayham Al-Banna of Arris.

Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 10:45 a.m.: “DOCSIS 3.1: Making It Real” (Room 108), moderated by Jorge Salinger of Comcast, with Dan Torbet of Arris, and Patricio Latini of Intraway.

And, putting aside the D3.1 future for a moment, let’s not forget about cable’s skinny upstream. This session promises to show how the industry is going to help the upstream pack on a few necessary pounds:

Thursday, Sept. 25 at 12:45 p.m. (Room 108): “Expanding The DOCSIS Upstream” (Room 108), moderated by George Hart of Rogers Communications, with John (Jack) Moran III Futurewei Technologies (Huawei), and Paul Brooks of Time Warner Cable.

WiFi

In the home or out on the network, WiFi is rapidly becoming a key weapon in cable’s arsenal. But it’s not all about feeds and speeds. Here are some sessions that will hit several of the bases:

Monday, Sept. 22 at 9:15 a.m. (Symposium): “Carrier Grade WiFi,” with Mark Poletti, CableLabs.

Monday, Sept. 22 at 10:45 a.m. (Symposium): “Community WiFi,” with Vivek Ganti, CableLabs.

Thursday, Sept. 25 at 12:45 p.m. (Room 102): “WiFi: The Quest dor Quality” (Room 102), moderated by Raymond Celona of Comcast, with Todd Smith of Comcast and Charles Cheevers of Arris.

Thursday, Sept. 25 at 2 p.m. (Room 102): “WiFi In The Connected Home,” moderated by Chris Albano of Comcast, with Chris Cholas of TWC and John Anderson of Fluke Networks.

Making Sense of SDN, NFV and the Internet of Things

Software-defined networking and network functional virtualization are keys to the future of telecom networks, but what are the benefits and potential pitfalls, and how is cable poised to take advantage of these trends. And why does cable care about the Internet of Things? These sessions will provide some answers:

Monday, Sept. 22 at 2 p.m. (Room 201): “Application of SDN and NFV in the Service Provider Delivery Network,” moderated by Bruce McClelland of Arris, with Adam Dunstan of Active Broadband Networks, and Alon Bernstein of Cisco Systems.

Tuesday, Sept. 23 at 9:45 a.m. (Room 102): “Cable’s Internet of Everything,”moderated by Mark Francisco of Comcast, with Mark Tubinis of Savant Systems.

Putting RDK And DevOps In The Picture

This year’s event is placing an emphasis on the “DevOps” model and the Reference Design Kit (RDK) for IP-capable devices. This session will mash them together:

Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 10:45 a.m.: “Putting DevOps Into Practice: The RDK Model” (Room 201), Moderated by Leslie Ellis of Ellis Edits, a Multichannel News contributor, with Labeeb Ismail of Comcast, Bill Warga of Liberty Global and Matt Zelesko of TWC.

Wednesday, Sept. 24

Ultra HD/4K

Sure, we’re still in the hype-filled days of 4K as set prices are still high and there’s not much content available in the format yet, but there are indications that Ultra HD is poised to become a hot format, rather than another flame-out that will remind everyone of 3DTV.

Tuesday, Sept. 23 at 11 a.m. (Room 203): “Ultra HD, HEVC and HDR Video From The Programmers’ Perspective,”moderated by Gregg Grigaitis of Suddenlink Communications, with Kirk Baker of Technicolor and Satoru Wajiki of the Japan Cable and Telecommunications Association.

The Big Picture

While workshops take a mind-melting, deep dive into key engineering topics, it’s still good to take a step back and try to see forest from the trees. For that, don’t miss the general sessions, and a special one assembled for cable’s ambitious energy management initiatives. 

Tuesday, Sept 23 at 8 a.m.  (Bellco Theater), following a keynote from Cisco’s Rob Lloyd, we’ll put our heads into the “cloud” to hear the forecast on apps and infrastructure with moderator Tony Werner of Comcast (and this year’s program committee chair), and Mark Muehl of Comcast, Geoff Arnold of Cisco, and Nick Barcet of eNovance/Red Hat.

Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 8 a.m. (Bellco Theater), and speaking of big picture, here’s one that will offer a global-sized snapshot, as Werner talks tech (and ops) Mike Fries, president and CEO of Liberty Global.

Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 1 p.m. (Room 103): “Energy 2020”: Comcast’s John Schanz (keynoter), with session moderator Theresa Hennesy of Comcast, Ivan Lamoureux of Suddenlink Communications, Simpson Cumba of Comcast, Derek DiGiacomo of SCTE, John Dolan of Rogers Communications, and Dan Cooper of TWC.

It’s been a hectic last few days wherever convention vectors intersect in Denver.  Denver International Airport has been alive with the bustle of inbound MSO and vendor executives. Conversations among old friends have been struck up in lines at hotel registration desks. Admins have been jostling to put together the best dinner meetings at Acorn, Sugarmill and points in between.

SCTE Cable-Tec Expo is back in town.

At the Colorado Convention Center, vendors selling everything from crimping tools to CCAPs [converged cable access platforms] have been putting the finishing touches on their exhibits. Audio-visual systems have been tested one last time. Speakers have been adding that final polish to keynote presentations and workshops.

SCTE Cable-Tec Expo is back in Denver.

When Tony Werner and I are delivering our opening remarks this week, you can bet the significance of holding the cable industry’s premier technology event in the Mile High City won’t escape us.  While Denver may no longer be “The Capital of Cable,” it retains a revered position in the industry’s history.

BACK TO THE ‘CAPITAL’

Denver was the focal point for the cable revolution that freed television viewers from the shackles of handfuls of VHF and UHF channels. Giants of our industry — Bill Daniels, John Malone, Bob Magness and others — used Denver as a base to bring vast menus of sports, entertainment, news and other content to America, and ultimately to the world. And in Denver, a new generation of technologists turned cable pioneers’ dreams of new communications platforms into the realities of broadband and voice services.

The good news is that the same spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that drove the growth of cable in Denver’s heyday is alive and well today. As SCTE itself celebrates its 45th anniversary, our organization has evolved from a handful of forward-thinking engineers to an increasingly agile organization that is the hub of technology learning, certification and standards for more than 18,000 members. 

With the creation of our Corporate Alliance Program, our relationships with organizations such as CableLabs, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and Women In Cable Telecommunications (WICT), as well as our increasingly global reach, SCTE is both creating solutions for the worldwide cable market, and demonstrating the business impact of those solutions well beyond the technology community.

MUCH TO SEE

At Cable-Tec Expo this year, the agenda is jammed with keynotes, panels, workshops and exhibits that are pointing the way to a new Golden Age for our industry. We’ll showcase strategies for increasing operational efficiency, reducing costs and boosting customer satisfaction. Among them: cloud-based services; agile software development; IP video delivery; and standards for next-generation equipment and facilities design, to name a few.

When you have a record 48 workshops and more than 96 educational sessions, as well as multiple keynotes and opening general sessions and countless other events, there’s no way for a preview to do justice to all of them in several hundred words.  We’ll do our best here to shine a spotlight on the highlights that will make SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2014 a memorable show.  Here are a few:

• We’ve brought together two global thought leaders — Rob Lloyd, president, sales and development for Cisco Systems, and Mike Fries, president and CEO of Liberty Global — for a twin helping of keynote remarks.  Rob will talk on Tuesday (Sept. 23) about the evolution of the customer experience and the role of the cloud in the emerging model. On Wednesday (Sept. 24), Tony will engage Mike, to give attendees a global view of the opportunities that are ahead for the industry.

• Tony will follow Rob Lloyd’s lead during Tuesday’s opening general session when he moderates a panel entitled, “Cable’s Cloud Forecast: More Apps and Infrastructure.”  Among the panelists who will provide glimpses into a cloud-based future: Dan Hennessy, chief architect of Liberty Global, and Mark Muehl, senior vice president, product engineering for Comcast.

• Two of our most important activities, Standards and Energy Management, often go hand in hand. If you’re designing, building, buying or deploying new equipment, you can’t afford to miss the “Energy 2020” session at 1 p.m. on Wednesday. John Schanz, executive vice president and chief network officer of Comcast, will keynote the session, which will provide the vendor and operator communities with further visibility into how the “Energy 2020” campaign is shaping standards and requirements for new equipment, training and other resources.   Also on tap:  presentations on Energy Efficiency; Energy Integration into Operations; Drive Density and Performance; and Performance and Reliability Tiering.

• Our workshops will address the technology innovations that are essential to the future of our industry: Next-Generation Customer Experiences (Improving Operations, Defining/Redefining the Connected Home, and the role of the “Silicon Technician”); Next-Generation Video (All-IP Video, Ultra HD/HEVC/HDR, Video Portability, Next-Gen User Interfaces); and Next-Generation Networks (Architectures and Virtualized-, Cloud- and Software-Defined Networks for Gigabit Services and Beyond). 

• When you’re not listening to our speakers, the best place to learn about where the industry is headed is the show floor. The Cloud, HEVC, IP Video, CCAP, DOCSIS 3.1 — our vendors are the innovators who are turning those technologies and others into products that are ready for deployment by the cable operator community.

• And, of course, there will be the International Cable Games, the IP Challenge and the other events and networking opportunities that make Cable-Tec Expo a magnet for cable engineering and operations professionals in the U.S. and, increasingly, worldwide.

SOARING IN THE ROCKIES

Denver will be alive with cable activity this week and make no mistake about it:  the city is still an important part of our industry’s landscape. Denver is many things — the headquarters city for the hub of international cable, Liberty Global; the location of The Cable Center; the jumping-off point for CableLabs; and the home to so many other companies and individuals who have contributed to our industry’s growth.

As one who spent many years here with my family, I hope you enjoy every minute of your time in the city. But most of all I hope that you make the most of everything we have to offer at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2014.

Mark Dzuban is president and CEO of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers.

On behalf of the Jones/NCTI team, I am thrilled to welcome our cable and broadband industry colleagues to Colorado for the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo. All of us at Jones/NCTI feel fortunate to call Denver home. We hope you will enjoy the show and your time in the Mile High City while you visit.  

While still sporting that Old West flair, you will find Denver bustles with urbanites and hipsters putting their mark on the city with inventive restaurants and hot spots. We made Travel & Leisure’s top 10 list of America’s Best Cities for Hipsters as well as Forbes’s list of Best Places for Business and Careers. Plus, as one of the healthiest cities in the nation, we claim fame to some pretty good eats. Whether you’re vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, paleo, or in the mood for steak, bison, elk and international fare, a culinary adventure awaits you in our city.

Some of the city’s best dining is located within walking distance of the Convention Center. Whether you are looking for a power breakfast, quick lunch, team dinner or a laid-back cocktail with views, we encourage you to enjoy some of our favorite establishments during the show.

Pre-Show Power Breakfast

Panzano

909 17th St.

On the corner of 17th and Champa Streets in the chic Hotel Monaco, Panzano is a great place to enjoy an upscale business breakfast. A favorite of locals, Panzano was described as “heavenly” by The Gabby Gourmet. Their fresh takes on the breakfast staples include omelets, eggs benedict, French toast, and a variety of regional Italian dishes, as well as an award-winning gluten-free menu courtesy of chef Elise Wiggins.

Close, Quick Lunch

Snarf’s

891 14th St.

If another convention center lunch just isn’t your thing, eat like you are back in college at the new downtown Snarf’s Sandwiches, located in The Spire Building right next door to the Convention Center.

Snarf’s began when “Snarf” Jimmy Seidel decided to open his own shop in Boulder and create the world’s best sandwich. Called “The Shack” by local Boulderites and University of Colorado students, the eatery offers tasty sandwiches on homemade bread, salads, soups as well as a variety of vegetarian options.

Evening Cocktails With a View

Tamayo

1400 Larimer St., in Larimer Square

Tamayo’s Tequila Bar and Rooftop Lounge are not to be missed, especially if you are looking for some of downtown Denver’s best Rocky Mountain views. Relax on the sofas after a long day on the convention center floor and enjoy their selection of more than 100 tequilas and agave-based spirits, margaritas, sangrias, mojitos or other hand-muddled cocktails. Don’t forget to order something from chef Richard Sandoval’s modern Mexican menu featuring grilled steak, adobo pork or chicken tinga.

Team Dinner

The Kitchen Denver (pictured)

1530 18th St.

The Kitchen Denver is a perfect place to share a nice dinner and connect with your team while you are in town. This community bistro focuses on local, sustainable, farm-to-table cuisine and sources from a variety of Colorado producers. Located in Denver’s historic LoDo (Lower Downtown) neighborhood, The Kitchen is bright and airy with plenty of distressed brick and wood, as well as a great bar area with a good selection of Colorado microbrews. The Kitchen Denver features a creative menu with fresh, seasonal ingredients, and be sure to try their staple, tomato soup.

Dinner Meeting

Bistro Vendome

1420 Larimer St.

If you are looking to escape the hustle and bustle of the Expo, head over to Bistro Vendome for some classic French bistro fare and a nice glass of wine with a customer or vendor on the outdoor patio. The restaurant features more than 65 wine selections, and a “Vin Maison” wine program that allows guests to select different wines to accompany their meal.  From fresh baguettes served in a paper bag, to mussels, escargot, crepes and duck confit, the menu by James Beard Award-Winner Jennifer Jasinski doesn’t miss. You can also walk around the corner to and visit Jasinski’s other fabulous restaurants — Rioja and Euclid Hall. They are all located on Denver’s historic Larimer Square.

Casual Group Meal

Wazee Supper Club

1600 15th Str.

A Denver favorite since 1974, Wazee Supper Club is your place to share a quick bite with your team after a long day. This landmark restaurant in LoDo has legendary pizza, stromboli and sandwiches. Don’t forget to try the “POTUS Punch,” a special drink created especially for President Obama when he stopped by just this last July. Made with vodka, lemon juice, simple syrup, mint and champagne the bar deems it a “sparkly, not-too-political punch.”

Colorado Happy Hour

Wynkoop Brewing Co.

1634 18th St.

Founded in 1988 by Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Wynkoop is the original pioneering brewpub in Colorado and a Denver institution. Focusing on small-batch ales and lagers made from all-natural ingredients, Wynkoop also features brewpub classic fare that is perfect for happy hour.

Stacey Slaughter is CEO and chief financial officer of Centennial, Colo.-based Jones/NCTI, a provider of corporate training to the cable and telecommunications industry. For more information, visit www.jonesncti.com.

Despite the threat of continued industry consolidation of distributors and suppliers, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) expects attendance at this year’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver to match up with last year’s event in Atlanta. Yes, flat is indeed the new growth.

“Historically, Denver has had strong on-site registrations,” SCTE president and CEO Mark Dzuban said. “We expect to be where we were last year. But some of that is factored into the on-site registrations we’re expecting.”

For those keeping score, last year’s Expo in Atlanta drew about 9,800, a 6% increase from the 2012 event in steamy Orlando, Fla.

Dzuban said the number of new, first-time exhibitors is up 64% for the Denver event, while total exhibitors are up roughly 16%. SCTE, he said, is also seeing a surge in international attendance, which was up 10% heading into the show.

That growth comes against the backdrop of SCTE’s deeper global focus. Earlier this month, for example, the SCTE launched the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE), a brand and training division that will supply training and certification resources around the world. It’s also there to “eliminate existing brand confusion” with the Society for Broadband Professionals, a U.K.-based founded in 1945 that also goes by “SCTE.”

While this year’s show will shine the spotlight on specific categories such as DOCSIS 3.1, 4K/Ultra HD, the Reference Design Kit (RDK), energy management, WiFi, a big overarching theme will be customer service, Dzuban said.

“If we look at last year’s Expo being about IP networking and going to all-IP networks and what that technical evolution looks like, this year if really about how do we use science and technology to improve the customer experience in a market that is very competitive, but so are we,” he said, noting that the event will play host to 48 workshops.

And expect a look into the cloud that doesn’t just skim along the surface of what’s evolved into a catch-all buzzword. “We’re not talking about Wikipedia: What is the cloud? This is about how to apply dos and don’ts and best practices,” Dzuban said.

SCTE, like other cable-focused organizations, has been tasked with developing growth strategies amid a consolidating market, which, again, is one of the reasons why it’s been expanding its reach and focus.

“If you look at our mission, the mission doesn’t change” in the face of a consolidating industry, Dzuban said. “It’s expanding our footprint and our relationship with existing MSOs to include – just as CableLabs is absorbing Europe CableLabs and the NCTA [National Cable & Telecommunications Association] having a larger international contingent – the global community.”

But don’t expect Cable Tec-Expo to set up its tent overseas, at least not yet.  SCTE has already locked in New Orleans for the site of its 2015 cable tech-fest, set for Oct. 13-16.

UPC Hungary’s decision to use ActiveVideo's cloud-based platform to bring YouTube content to set-tops that don’t speak IP has proven popular in the early going.

The MSO announced Thursday that customers have been watching more than 1 million minutes per day of YouTube content in the first three months after the MSO introduced a set of apps for the set-top box. Of the more than 20 apps on offer (others include Google Maps, Picasa and Flickr), YouTube has been the most popular so far, with 75% of them being repeat visitors and spending 45 minutes per YouTube session on average.

But, as indicated by UPC Hungary data illustrated in the chart above, YouTube usage falls off a cliff during prime time hours.

Following the initial phase of the rollout, the MSO plans to offer UPC TV Apps to all 1.5 million homes in its footprint by the end of 2014. More than half of UPC customers with HD boxes have started to tap into the apps so far.

Whenever the topic of TV Everywhere usage comes up, tricky and kluge authentication systems are typically viewed as the biggest barriers to wide-scale consumer adoption.

While authentication systems have been an easy target of disdain and scorn, pay-TV providers and their partners have made some strides with in-home auto-authentication, with improved out-of-home authentication one of the items on TVE’s tech roadmap. A recent study from Adobe found that TVE adoption is indeed on the rise, even if it usage represents a smidgen of overall viewing.

A new study from TDG, meanwhile, suggests that authentication is not what’s hindering widespread use of TVE services, finding in a survey of 758 people TVE users that just 7% of users found the process something less than easy, while 19.1% found it “very easy” (see chart).

TDG president and director of research Michael Greeson holds that authentication isn’t that big of a deal, since logging in is a common, not-so-foreign activity now for most people who do anything on the Web.

"Unfortunately, authentication has been demonized by industry executives as a key reason TVE use is not more widespread. Unfortunately, pointing to authentication as the cause of slow TVE uptake is a red herring, distracting attention from the real culprits: poor marketing and the inconsistent availability of the newest shows,”  Greeson said in a statement.

I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying authentication is a red herring when it comes to TVE adoption. While I agree that the actual act of logging in is easy enough, not everyone knows what their TVE-facing user names and passwords are, and having to track down that information is still a time-consuming, mind-numbing chore. It’s too early to take authentication off the hook or to declare that it’s now a non-issue.

But he also makes the point that TVE more significant challenges are on the marketing and content fronts.

It’s hard not to agree with that, as CTAM tries to tackle TVE's marketing challenges (Sorry, I just can't bring myself to use the suggested lower-case branding treatment of TV Everywhere...old habits die hard, you know?).

From a content perspective, TVE is still frustrating and confusing. The amount and type of content offered via TVE from one MVPD or programmer is different than another. Some offer live linaer feeds, others don’t. And some live feeds are supported only when the customer is on the home network, while others can be streamed from outside the home. Some on-demand offerings provide access to a full season of a TV show, while others give you access to a small sampling of the current season. And on and on. The only thing uniform about TVE content today is that none of it is uniform.

And that all comes down to the digital rights and how the players are trying to monetize TVE, which is another important challenge the distributors and programmers are facing.  

While all of these challenges and issues are steadily improving, there's still plenty of blame to spread around. And I'm still looking at you, Mr. Authentication.

In a blurb describing technical sessions at next week's SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, a few words jump out. They emphasize how the presentations will examine technologies that generate "both CapEx and OpEx savings" for cable operators.  

Nothing wrong with that: it's a strong value proposition that technology is being developed and deployed to serve the sacred financial bottom line.

With this year's introduction and expansion of its "Corporate Alliance" program,  the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers is escalating its intent to use "the science and technology of engineering  to support a business case," as SCTE President/CEO Mark Dzuban told me during our annual pre-Expo conversation.  Many of Dzuban's remarks about SCTE's direction reflect the growing business-centric approach that he has brought to the technology association.

Again there's nothing wrong about engineering management focused on business objectives.  But it is a notable shift from SCTE's slogan under Dzuban's predecessor: "All engineering, all the time." To be fair, John Clark, the previous SCTE chief, was a marketing guy, and his nifty incantation did not ignore the business requirements of good engineering.

Dzuban said, "My mantra is 'the business of engineering,' bringing in the skills that improve the bottom line."  That sounds like the kiss of Comcast, which is always about the bottom line. Comcast is a major supporter of the SCTE Corporate Alliance, which, Dzuban notes, "is focused on education and far greater scale."

"It [the Alliance] is a collaboration between the MSOs [who face] common problems," he added, pointing to the increased integration of technology and business decisions.  For validation, finance-focused Dzuban reminded me that engineering and operations are responsible for two-thirds of cable operators' capital budgets.  

Creation of the Alliance brings more corporate presence into SCTE, which for more than four decades has been a "society" of individual engineers and technologists who worked for cable operators or suppliers.  Before joining SCTE, Dzuban spent eight years in top management posts at Cedar Point Communications, a voice technology vendor focused on the cable industry. Prior to that, he worked for AT&T, Bell Labs and AT&T Broadband for more than 20 years.  Those old Bell System management training programs certainly drummed ideas about engineering management into technologists' brains.   

The evolution of Cable-Tec Expo from a geek-fest into a tech management event matches the industry's maturation.  For several years (especially since Dzuban took the SCTE helm in 2009), the conference has increasingly heard from corporate "suits." This year's keynoters include Liberty Global President /CEO Mike Fries, who is unlikely to offer tips on network virtualization, software-defined networks, adaptive bit rates, HEVC, EPON, GPON or RFoG (all topics on Expo's agenda).  

But Fries doesn't have to discuss those topics. He and other non-technical cable executives will be at the Denver conference, in part, to remind the technical troops about why they're doing what they do.  

Under Dzuban, SCTE has beefed up its management initiatives, including its Executive Leadership Program with Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business, which debuted in 2011.  SCTE's business-focus is also emerging on many fronts, especially on Cable-Tec Expo's agenda.  For example, its "Energy 2020" project pushes for standards and best practices through use of advanced technology.  Dzuban adds a financial spin to the energy reduction goal, noting that "energy needs will grow along with broadband usage."

"Think of it as a significant incremental cost that is always increasing," he said.

 The message is clear: all engineering is ultimately about the money all the time.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.  

Time Warner Cable said it has begun to light up a metro WiFi network in San Diego that encompasses more than 300 hotspots today, and will expand by “hundreds” more by the end of 2014.

The initial WiFi build in San Diego is focused on heavily populated areas in Carlsbad, Coronado, Del Mar, La Jolla, Mission Beach and Pacific Beach.

With the additions, TWC has installed more than 17,000 hotspots in Southern California, and more than 46,000 nationwide, thanks to deployments in parts of Austin, Texas; Kansas City; Hawaii; Charlotte, N.C.; and New York City.

TWC is also a member of a “Cable WiFi” roaming alliance that has deployed  more than 250,000 hotspots, and includes participation from Comcast, Cablevision Systems, Bright House Networks and Cox Communications.

“We know that being connected to the Internet wherever you are is a hugely important feature, so we’ll continue to invest to bring WiFi to areas where our customers live, work and play,” said Deborah Picciolo, SVP of operations for Time Warner Cable, in a statement. “It’s like taking your home Internet service with you. That’s why WiFi deployment continues to be a top initiative for Time Warner Cable and we are thrilled to be expanding to San Diego.”

TWC, which has historically sourced WiFi gear from Ericsson, Cisco Systems and Ruckus Wireless, has also been equipping its WiFi network with Hotspot 2.0 technology that supports cellular-like handoff capabilities.

A TWC official confirmed that the MSO is using Ruckus equipment for the San Diego buildout.

Virgin Media, the largest cable operator in the U.K., is tossing its hat into the 1-Gig ring via a small trial that will try out a new trenching technique that, it claims, can reduce deployment costs by 33%.

Virgin Media, a unit of Liberty Global, said it will use the technique – called “narrow-trenching” -- to bring 1-Gig speeds to about 100 households in the Cambridgeshire village of Papworth. According to the MSO, narrow-trenching reduces the width of the trench used to lay fiber from 40 centimeters to about 10 centimeters, enabling engineers to cover up to 100 meters per day, about twice as fast as current methods.

John Henry Group, a construction services company based in Cambridge, is teaming with the operator on the narrow-trenching project in Papworth.

The area being targeted by the trial is not an overbuild of Virgin Media’s existing cable plant, but will instead touch homes that are close to the MSO’s network, a spokeswoman said via email. ‘

“The narrow-trenching trial is underway and we’ll start connecting homes over the coming weeks,” she added, noting that Virgin Media will disclose more details about the trial, including pricing, at a later date. Virgin Media said it will contact homes directly that are eligible for the 1-Gig trial.

Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, applauded Virgin Media’s trial. The MSO “is to be commended for their continued exploration and development of new technologies which are helping transform the UK’s digital landscape," Javid said, in a statement. "Virgin Media’s continued investment in the expansion of their network, together with Government’s own rollout of superfast broadband to rural areas, is already playing a significant role in driving the UK’s economic growth.”

Virgin Media today uses its DOCSIS 3.0 platform to deliver a high-speed Internet tier that tops out at 152 Mbps.

Following a string of lawsuits about alleged patent violations and unfair trade practices, chipmakers Entropic Communications and ViXS Systems announced Monday that they have settled all litigation and agreed to execute cross-licensing deals that cover patents linked to the litigation.

The peace agreement smooths out what has been a rocky relationship between rivals that has grown more competitive in part because both companies make silicon for Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), a high-speed home networking platform for set-tops, gateways and Ethernet-over-coax bridge devices.

Last May, Entropic targeted ViXS in a California district court, alleging that its competitor had infringed on two of its “core” home coax networking patents.

In April of this year, ViXS filed a complaint at the U.S. International Trade Commission alleging that Entropic had engaged in unfair trade practices by using certain set-tops, gateways and other devices that, it claimed, infringed on four asserted patents. ViXS also complained that Entropic's timing was suspect becasue the suit was targeting ViXS as the Toronto-based company was in the midst of an initial public offering. ViXS's complaint also sought to halt the importation into the U.S. and sale after importation products that use Entropic’s MoCA silicon, and included DirecTV, Wistron NeWeb Corp., and CyberTAN on the list of defendants. The settlement announced Monday dismissed actions against those defendants, the companies said.

Other terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

"Today's settlement allows both companies to move on as two of the industry's innovation leaders," said Patrick Henry, president and CEO, Entropic, in a statement. "We have set aside our differences while addressing the needs of our customers, our shareholders and the industry."

"We are pleased to find an amicable and effective solution to the litigation with Entropic," added Sally Daub, president and CEO, ViXS. "We expect to continue the productive collaboration the companies have established over the years."

Elemental Technologies has become the latest video processing and packaging specialist to swim into deeper waters by launching a platform designed to vastly expand its multiscreen business.

At IBC in Amsterdam, the company has introduced Elemental Delta, a video delivery platform designed to help media companies and distributors add time-shifted services while also cutting down costs and reducing complexities.

Elemental said it’s been able to bring several “major” telcos, OTT, broadcast, satellite and mobile operators in the U.S., Europe (including ops in France, the U.K. and Sweden), and Middle East (including Qatar), and in New Zealand and Brazil, to Delta, a platform that’s designed to support several types of apps and services, including catch-up and start-over TV, and network DVRs. Elemental's customer base includes HBO, the BBC, ESPN, ABC News, CBS Interactive and Comcast, among others.

At IBC, Euan McLeod, director digital media technologies at Turner Broadcasting, was schedule to talk about how the programmer is using Delta to power its new CNNx TV Everywhere app, an Elemental official said.

Elemental said the platform, which uses a software-defined approach that ties into a broader SDN trend, combines just-in-time packaging, origin services, intelligent caching, dynamic ad insertion and replacement, and content protection functions in a single platform that also supports the major adaptive streaming protocols (HDS, HLS, Smooth Streaming and MPEG-DASH), compression formats, and multiple digital rights management systems.

Elemental isn’t alone in attacking the market with a broader, platform-centered approach to multiscreen video. For example, Envivio, another company known for video processing and packaging, launched a more well-rounded platform called Nuage earlier this month.

While many get ready for some R&R this weekend, thousands of video industry people will be burning it on both ends in Amsterdam as the confab continues to roll on.

Here’s a looks at what else is making news there. Check out our earlier IBC news roundups here and here.

-TiVo’s shot at achieving global domination is well underway. The DVR and video software company said it’s expanding its European footprint to include sales, marketing and account management staff offices in Austria, England, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, noting that they’ll be dedicated to personalized video products – a move that happens to come on the heels of TiVo's acquisition of Digitasmiths. TiVo, which already working with Com Hem in Sweden, Ono in Spain and Virgin Media in the U.K., isn't saying how many staffers will be based at these expanded international posts, but the company employs 635 people worldwide today. So we reckon that the number we were looking for is something less than 635.

-Alcatel-Lucent said it’s working on a new architecture that will help pay TV providers store a customer’s favorite TV shows in the cloud at low cost while also maintaining compliance with content rights and copyright laws. Under U.S. rules, cloud DVRs must make a private copy for each recording request made by a given household -- horribly inefficient from a storage standpoint when compared to areas of the world that alllow multiple subscribers to stream off of the same recorded copy. Alcatel-Lucent said will be getting around this via a “virtual private copy architecture” that combines a tiered storage system with its Velocix Content Delivery Network (CDN), claiming that the approach can reduce storage costs by up to 75%. The company is developing a prototype of the architecture and expects it to be ready for trials in mid-2015, followed by commercial availability toward the end of next year.

-SeaChange International is demoing a new platform that integrates Freesat’s next-gen Freetime service with SeaChange’s multiscreen Adrenalin video backoffice platform. They’re pitching the combo, which includes a catch-up and recommendation engine,  to IPTV, satellite, cable and terrestrial operators. Freesat, a joint venture of the U.K.’s ITV and the BBC, is a subscription-free service with more than 200 channels, plus on-demand, that’s in over 1.85 million homes. 

-Envivio has shed more light on the tech partners who are tied into Nuage, its new multiscreen video platform. They include Microsoft (content protection), Adobe Primetime (video playback, authentication, DRM, and ad insertion/decisioning), Dolby (audio processing), and 1 Mainstream (automated video app platform).

-Brightcove has unveiled Brightcove Perform, a video playback system for multiscreen video that supports management APIs and its “HTML5-first” Brightcove Player. As the performance of Perform goes, the company is making the lofty claim that it can load up to 70% than competitive players, including YouTube’s. That player will also be available soon as part of the company’s flagship Video Cloud online video platform.

-Verimatrix said Swisscom has selected its Video Content Authority System (VCAS) to secure the operator’s new TV 2.0 service, which runs on an Android-powered set-top and marks Swisscom’s move away from Mediaroom, the former Microsoft IPTV platform that is now part of Ericsson. Swisscom TV 2.0 supports live TV and a seven-day replay service for 250 channels.

-EchoStar is using IBC to offer a sneak peak at a  home automation and security platform that will feature “do-it-yourself” installation and enable the control of thermostats, security cameras, door sensors, lights, doorbells and switches. EchoStar said the new product is expected to debut in “various territories” in early 2015.

-Second-screen specialist Visiware said its Sync2TV platform reaches more than 50 million users, with 500,000 of them “engaged” with several single TV shows. Visiware said it’s working with several producers and networks, including Disney, Embassy Row, Endemol, ESPN, NBC Universal, the NFL, ITV, M6, Sony, and TF1, among others.

-Harmonic has released its Polaris playout management suite of tools and integrated them with its Spectrum media server family. Harmonic also unveiled new multiscreen packaging and origination capabilities for its VOS software-based media processing platform that adds  packaging-on-the-fly and low-latency origin server capabilities that were originally developed for its ProMedia multiscreen applications. Sky Italia is one the first customers to deploy the VOS platform for its broadcast and multiscreen services.

-Speaking of Sky Italia, it has also deployed Imagine Communications’ Magellan SDN Orchestrator, a distribution system for both ASI and IP transport streams across broadcast routers and commercial IP switches that’s tied into a common software-defined network infrastructure

Ericsson is adding more cloud DVR and VOD assets and talent to its video roster through a $95 million acquisition of Israel-based Fabrix Systems.

Ericsson, which wrapped up its acquisition of Microsoft’s Mediaroom unit about a year ago and its purchase of Azuki Systems in February, said its latest buy will expand its multiscreen video portfolio.

Fabrix specializes in cloud storage and computing and network-based video delivery. One of its known customers is Cablevision Systems, which is using Fabrix to help power its network-based Multi-Room DVR product that now allows customers to record as many as 15 shows at once following a recent upgrade.

Fabrix has kept its wins close to the vest, but Mario Rainville, Fabrix’s VP of sales and marketing, told Multichannel News earlier this year that the company had “large deployments” with more than 10 tier-1 service providers in North America and Europe.

At this year’s NAB show in Las Vegas, Fabrix showed off targeted ad-insertion system tailored for cloud DVRs (subscription required) that utilized Fabrix’s software running on off-the-shelf servers and relied on an automated, programmatic-style ad-buying/selling model.  Febrix’s demo was run on a camaign-managmenet system from Videology.

Ericsson’s latest acquisition follows upgrades to its Mediaroom platform and a new MediaFirst offering that will be covered in more detail soon by Multichannel News.

“We are investing significantly across our TV platform and video-network areas to extend our market leadership position. Our Media Vision 2020 shows that traditional TV is shifting rapidly towards TV Anywhere and Ericsson's leadership in broadcast, video and networks places us in a unique position to enable the most demanding customers to define and deliver the future of TV,” Per Borgklint, SVP and head of business unit support solutions at Ericsson, said in a statement.

Ericsson said it expects to close the deal in the fourth quarter. Founded in 2006, Fabrix has 103 employees.

HBO GO, the popular multiscreen TV Everywhere service, could soon show up on cable set-top boxes in Europe after the premium programmer struck up a partnership with ActiveVideo, maker of a cloud-based platform that delivers apps and services to IP- and non-IP devices.

Under a partnership announced at the IBC show in Amsterdam, HBO Europe said it plans to bring HBO GO (its content and the interface) to set-tops, both young and old, using ActiveVideo’s CloudTV StreamCast platform.

Introduced in April, the new StreamCast component for ActiveVideo’s CloudTV converts user interfaces, video and other content from Web formats to versions that can be rendered and displayed by non-IP set-tops. That conversion and bridging process covers elements such as content protection and content delivery. As designed, the system delivers an MPEG/QAM or H.264 stream packed with the content as well as the UI.

HBO Europe, which operates in 14 territories in eastern and central Europe and the Netherlands, said it intends to bring HBO GO to full footprints of existing set-top boxes, targeting existing HBO GO affiliates.

HBO and ActiveVideo didn’t announce if any affiliates have agreed to jump on board, but Liberty Global’s UPC Hungary unit is the first announced MSO to deploy the CloudTV/StreamCast combo, using it to bring YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and other Internet-based apps to non-IP boxes. Ziggo of the Netherlands and Deutsche Telekom are among other MSOs in Europe that work with ActiveVideo.

“The marriage of libraries of the very best online content and the 10-foot viewing experience of television holds tremendous potential for pay-TV - online video collaboration,” said Jeff Miller, president and CEO of ActiveVideo, in a statement. “Virtualizing STB functionality in the cloud is the key to creating partnerships that can drive audience reach and content expansion for the benefit of both parties.”

In the run-up to IBC, ActiveVideo also announced that it has become a licensee of the Reference Design Kit (RDK), and has boosted the scaling capabilities of its “virtual” set-top architecture by supporting off-the-shelf network servers outfitted with Intel’s new Quick Sync Video technology.

The trend may be toward the so-called “virtualization” of the set-top box as more of those functions get packed into the cloud, but that doesn’t mean traditional boxes will be going the way of the dodo anytime soon.

On that point, Arris is using the IBC show in Amsterdam to unveil a new, sleeker design for IPTV set-tops and video clients that are equipped with HEVC decoding and 802.11ac WiFi, with some models capable of supporting 4K/Ultra HD video.

The VIP4000 and VIP5000 series products being previewed at IBC are based on Arris’s KreaTV IPTV platform. But they also represent the first in a family of new designs that will support both telcos and cable operators and a “variety of software applications,” an Arris spokeswoman said.

Those products, the first to feature Arris’ new high-gloss, fancy set-top design, will be offered in several colors -- snow & copper; ice blue; “Arris orange” (they have staked their claim on this particular shade, apparently); tinted grey; premium umbra; and midnight purple. The front of model will also feature “fluted LED lighting”  that will allow color-customized branding. Arris expects to launch them globally starting next year.

Here’s the initial model lineup for each series:

VIP4000 Series (HEVC compatibility for HD)

-VIP4000: A compact HEVC 1080p60 HD IP set-top with an 80x80x13mm form factor equipped with 802.11ac 2x2 dual-band Wi-Fi antennas.  

-VIP4300 – Featuring a circular design and USB connectivity for DVR and time-shifting, this one decodes HEVC HD 1080p60 and features 802.11ac.  

-VIP4600 – A “fully featured” HEVC 1080p60 HD IP set-top, housing up to 1 terabyte of storage for DVR applications, plus 802.11ac.

VIP5000 Series (Ultra HDTV-capable)

-VIP5200 – An HEVC Ultra-HD IP set-top, supporting up to 4Kx2Kp30 with up to 1TB of storage and 802.11ac.

VIP5600 – A fully featured HEVC Ultra-HD IP set-top for UHD p60 with 10-bit color, plus 1TB of storage and 802.11ac.

Arris, which saw set-top and gateway shipments rise 8% in the second quarter, also extended the design theme to a new family of remote controls – a version with a full set of functions and short cut keys, a mid-level model with number keys and the “most important function keys” around the main navigation key, and a compact model with a small set of user keys.

So, the set-top box appears to be alive and well -- or at least is putting on a fresh face -- despite constant predictions of its demise.

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) and CableLabs said they are teaming up to improve energy management for cable, providing the industry with strategies and innovations aimed at cutting energy consumption and costs in facilities, plants and fleet, as well as in the home.

The two organizations said they are expanding their existing relationship to ensure greater coordination between two distinct areas: CableLabs’ focus within the customer premise, and SCTE’s responsibility for the remainder of the industry’s technical operations.  The increased cooperation includes greater sharing of information and resources, as well as cross-representation that assures that activities undertaken by either organization are aligned with the needs of the other, they said.

They will highlight their handiwork at exhibits and sessions at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver, set for September 22-25. A sampling of what’s on tap:

-A demo at the CableLabs exhibit of “sleep mode” on a Samsung six-tuner DOCSIS 3.0 set-top box that’s designed to reduce power draw by 40 percent;

-SCTE’s “Energy 2020” session on Wednesday, Sept. 24 that will be keynoted by John Schanz, executive vice president and Chief Network Officer of Comcast and that will outline the product requirements and standards needed for cable’s next generation of energy efficient networks and equipment;

-Workshop sessions on “Optimizing Energy Consumption” and “Ensuring Energy on Thursday, Sept. 25.

“CableLabs is supporting energy efficiency initiatives on many fronts, by providing substantial technical support to the STB Voluntary Agreement, updating existing specifications to address low-power modes, and driving energy efficiency into the forefront of new industry specifications”, said Ralph Brown, CTO of CableLabs, in a statement.

“Through our pioneering Smart Energy Management Initiative and now the Energy 2020 program, SCTE is creating the standards, the best practices and the industry consensus that are enabling cable operators to reduce costs and ensure energy availability in cable networks,” added Daniel Howard, senior vice president and CTO of SCTE.

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers is taking on more global proportions with the launch of an international-facing training brand and the addition of Liberty Global to the group’s recently introduced “Corporate Alliance.”

On the training front, SCTE on Monday introduced the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE), a unit that will focus on training and provide certification resources to cable engineers and other operations pros around the world.

SCTE said ISBE will “service as an international gateway” to its library of educational and certification resource and is “aligned with the global activity of CableLabs.

SCTE noted that ISBE also aims to “eliminate existing brand confusion,” an apparent reference to the Society for Broadband Professionals, a U.K.-based organization founded in 1945 that also goes by “SCTE.”

“Cable system operators around the world face a universal challenge: the need to make sure that their workforces are prepared for the new technologies that are on the horizon,” said Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE, in a statement. “ISBE will bridge gaps in existing training curricula, bringing state-of-the-art content that is fine-tuned to address industry needs to cable engineering and operations professionals in every market.”

“Consumer demand for next-generation services is driving the need for increased training and certification for our technical workforce,” added Balan Nair, EVP and CTO of Denver-based Liberty Global, which operates extensively in Europe, as well as Chile and Puerto Rico. “The International Society of Broadband Experts’ ability to leverage SCTE resources will make available new training that is aligned with our operational needs.”

Liberty Global is also brining some international flair to the SCTE Corporate Alliance Program (CAP), an initiative launched in April that provides additional training and education tools to operator and vendor partners and aims to boost the Society’s membership base.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Suddenlink Communications were CAP’s charter members. SCTE announced the inclusion of Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications and Cox Communications in mid-August. On the supplier side, Arris Gropu and Alpha Technologies are on board as “beta vendor partners.” SCTE expects to launch a full vendor program for CAP sometime next year .

“With operations in 14 countries, Liberty Global required a single, recognizable source of workforce education across all of its markets,” said Daniel Howard, senior vice president and CTO for SCTE, said in a release. “By combining the global reach of ISBE with proven, effective SCTE resources that are the most up-to-date, we can expedite the availability of SCTE training that is considered the gold standard in the industry.”

At last check, SCTE had about 18,000 individual members.

Saluting the best and brightest in technology, NewBay Media, parent of Multichannel News, is introducing a new awards program at the 2014 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo later this month.

The Multichannel News Innovator Awards will honor distinctive new products at the 2014 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, slated for Sept. 22-25 in Denver.

Winners will be selected by a panel of cable executives and Multichannel News contributors, based on descriptions provided by exhibitors via a nomination form, as well as upon the judges’ inspection at the Expo.

“Multichannel News, the leader in cable technology coverage, is excited to launch our Innovator Awards at the 2014 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo,” said Louis Hillelson, vice president, group publisher of Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable. “With so much technological innovation taking place in our market it was important we launch and salute the top innovators taking a lead role in shaping the industry of today and tomorrow.”

The award winners will be cited in an upcoming issue of Multichannel News. All nominated products will be featured in the “MCN Innovator Guide” that will be distributed in digital form to readers of those publications after the convention. Multichannel News is the official publication provider of the 2014 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.

SCTE exhibitors may submit multiple products for consideration. Entries are due at the close of business on Friday, Sept. 5.

More information about the Multichannel News Innovator Awards are available here.

Enter your product (s) now by clicking here.

Marshall Goldsmith, a top executive coach, will deliver the keynote remarks when the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) hosts its Annual Awards Luncheon on Tuesday, Sept. 23 at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver, the Society announced Tuesday.

Goldsmith, a member of the faculty of the SCTE-Tuck Executive Leadership Program at Dartmouth, will address the leadership themes that earned him recognition in 2011 as the world’s top leadership thinker at the bi-annual Thinker50 ceremony sponsored by the Harvard Business Review, SCTE said.

Goldsmith’s remarks will follow three awards presentations for SCTE leadership: the Member of the Year Award, the Women in Technology Award, and Hall of Fame recognition. 

“Cable’s ability to identify and groom innovative thinkers and new leaders has grown the industry into an indispensable part of the telecommunications landscape,” said Lindsay Johnston, senior vice president, operations for SCTE, in a statement. “The principles espoused by Marshall Goldsmith are essential to the industry’s ability to continue the leadership traditions that are being recognized by our luncheon awards.”

Goldsmith has authored 32 books, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There—the latter a WSJ No. 1 business book and winner of the Harold Longman Award for Business Book of the Year.   

Goldsmith has been recognized by BusinessWeek as one of the 50 great leaders in America, by the Wall Street Journal as one of the Top 10 executive educators, and by Forbes as one of the most-respected executive coaches, SCTE noted.

SCTE Cable-Tec Expo is slated to run Sept. 22-25 at the Colorado Convention Center.

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers has added three cable operators -- Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications and Cox Communications -- to its recently announced Corporate Alliance Program.

The SCTE announced the program in April, with Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Suddenlink Communications on board as charter members, offering new training and education and programs and elements aimed at expanding the SCTE’s base of individual members.

SCTE said Alpha Technologies and Arris Group are also on board as “beta vendor partners,” and will help the organization develop a full vendor program that’s expected to launch sometime in 2015.

The program is designed to help the Society form a stronger bond with its operator and vendor partners with new technology training tools and education programs, including seats at the SCTE Leadership Institute programs at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. The program also offers discounts for individual memberships. A one-year SCTE membership typically runs $68.

In April, SCTE said it had just under 17,000 members, and now has approximately 18,000.

Execs from the three new Corporate Alliance members extolled the virtues of the program:

"Specialized, top-quality training helps advance the career growth of our technical teams, drive adoption of new technical skills and deliver better customer experiences," said Pragash Pillai, senior vice president of network management and operations for Cablevision, in a statement. "These benefits make our membership in the Corporate Alliance Program so important. We are proud that our engineering and operations teams are able to leverage the advantages of SCTE training, which includes access to a vast library of resources and training materials that have been created with direct input from the operator community."

"While Corporate Alliance offers a variety of benefits, there are two that are of greatest value to Charter," added Wayne Davis, vice president, technical operations for Charter. "The immediate ability to bring SCTE training and educational resources to our engineering team as a whole, as well as the ability to identify candidates for the SCTE-Georgia Tech and SCTE Tuck leadership programs that will help us develop our next generation of management professionals."

“Aligning training with deployment is key to accelerated rollouts of new cable services,” said Marci Saaijenga, vice president of technology quality and control for Cox. "The Corporate Alliance Program’s unified learning environment creates a setting in which member organizations like ours can have continued access to the best new thinking and training processes from throughout the industry."

Showgoers can expect a deep dive into the cloud paired with some international flair at this fall's Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Cable-Tec Expo.

SCTE announced Tuesday that Rob Lloyd, president, development and sales of Cisco Systems, and Mike Fries, president and CEO of Liberty Global, have been tapped as keynoters for the confab, set to run September 22-25 in Denver.

During his keynote on Tuesday, Sept. 23, Lloyd, a 19-year veteran of Cisco, will discuss the evolution of the consumer experience and the role of the cloud in the emerging model, SCTE said.

The Fries’s keynote, set for Wednesday, Sept. 24, will come in the form of a conversation with Tony Werner, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Comcast Cable and chair of the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2014 Program Committee. As the head of Liberty Global, Fries runs and international MSO with about 25 million customers.

“Rob Lloyd’s keynote remarks and Tony Werner’s conversation with Mike Fries will offer this year’s Cable-Tec Expo attendees truly advanced and global perspectives from three of the most influential executives who are shaping the future of cable,” said Daniel Howard, senior vice president and CTO of SCTE, in a statement. “These executives will provide the industry at large with valuable insights into how cable operators and vendors are working together in new ways to address the increasing competition and customer demand for new services, applications, platforms, architectures and speed in broadband networks – all of which will drive cable’s growth in the years to come.”

Last week, SCTE and CableLabs announced the speaker and panel lineup for a full-day “Symposium” focused on wireless and DOCSIS 3.1 that will take Monday, Sept. 22, in conjunction with the Cable-Tec Expo.