This week I have been returning to old thoughts about how things have changed over the last 10 years and what I see today as the rising challenge of Digital Terrestrial/Satellite combined with an Internet return path on Hybrid boxes.
The decade started with Digital promise as wider scale EuroDOCSIS acceptance gave way to wider deployment of Digital Cable TV, and quite early on the race took place in Europe to deploy Video on demand services over that infrastructure. This was all very traditional with the EuroDOCSIS side of the boxes pretty much restricted to control messaging for unicast style QAM video streams (sometimes with CA protection, mostly without … ahem).
This was the USP (Unique Selling Point) of cable, which in actual fact the cable companies were relatively slow to monopolise against the incumbent Digital Satellite and fledgling Digital Terrestrial services. Many of the European operators only managed to get commercial VoD delivered in scale at the end of 2005 or even 2006. In the meantime, those other technologies were developing reponses to the lack of high bandwidth return path, and were creating PushVoD services combined with the innovation they initially created in Europe – DVR or PVR boxes.
After 2006 we entered the golden era of cable – where VoD services took off, and customers caught the bug of on demand content, nicely feathered by the cable companies. They enjoyed a nice little earner, but now D-Sat and DTT are fighting back, although this is not just duplication of commercial VoD – they are fighting back with the the addition of OTT content – content generated through other sources such YouTube and Video Podcasts. At least it seems this way at these early stages before things like Canvas and HbbTV have launched as second generation attempts, after companies like BT and Homechoice/Tiscali TV/Talk Talk TV have laid arguably unsuccessful groundwork.
So how will Cable fight back? what will be the response to the loss of their USP? Is there another USP for Cable? What are the challenges and advantages for the Hybrid world?
More on my thoughts about that in future post.
