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NewsGlobe: Today's News
IPTV 2007: MPEG-4 And HDTV To Boost IPTV?
Vendors and Operators Upbeat On ‘Next-Gen’ Business Case
by Ken Wieland
Many operators and vendors attending the IPTV World Forum
typically describe HDTV as a ‘must have’ and a key
differentiator from cable operators – particularly for North
American markets and increasingly so for Europe.
A spokesperson for Canadian IPTV operator Telus was
confident that HDTV – combined with low-cost set-top-boxes
(sub US$100 levels) equipped with MPEG-4 encoders – would
enable it to steal a march on rival cable operators’ offerings.
“We can afford to offer the set-top-boxes (STBs) [MPEG-4 equipped] for free
and then charge a premium for HD channels,” he said. “By
contrast, cable operators have to sell their STBs for around
US$400 and don’t have as much HD content as we do.”
Telus has around 25 HD channels available at the moment
and aims to increase that number to 40 by the end of this
year. But there are still problems to overcome. The obvious
one is there isn’t yet enough HD content. What’s more, HDTV-
equipped TV sets can actually receive a poorer SDTV
(standard definition TV) image than SDTV sets due to
inefficient conversion between the two standards.
“It was a shock to us when we found that 30 per cent of our
[TV] subscriber base possessed HDTV sets,” said the
spokesperson. “It means that we have to focus more on
educating our customers.”
This presumably means that Telus has to manage customers’
disappointment if they are receiving poor pictures on their
HDTV sets, perhaps by encouraging them that more HD
content is on the way shortly.
Consumer uptake of HDTV has been boosted by the falling
prices of plasma TV screens, but operators are also becoming
keen as the economics of delivering it become more
attractive.
“Second generation encoders make the business case work,”
said David Price, VP of product marketing at Harmonic, a
supplier of (not surprisingly) second generation MPEG-4
video encoders (based on the H.264 compression standard).
Despite Price’s obvious bias, Harmonic can probably claim
legitimately that it is helping to make HDTV significantly more
economical to deliver through more efficient encoders,
particularly for DSL and Digital Terrestrial TV providers
with bandwidth constraints.
Last September Harmonic announced encoders capable
of ‘pristine’ HDTV at 8Mbps (compared to the industry
standard of 10-12Mbps) and a HDTV ‘Lite’ service delivered
over 4Mbps. SD channels, using second generation encoders,
need 1.5Mbps as opposed to the previous norm of 2.5Mbps.
Armed with these figures, Price outlined a number of service
scenarios for IPTV operators who have 20Mbps to offer
customers at their disposal. This included a ‘super’ HSI (high-
speed internet offer) of 7Mbps, combined with capacity for
one HD channel and two SD channels.
With the help of system-on-a-chip technology, a
spokesperson for ADB (a STB supplier) announced it was
able to deliver MPEG-4 enabled STBs (using Harmonic
encoders) for less than US$100. It was welcome news, given
that subsidized STBs can be among the biggest capex items
for large-scale IPTV rollouts.
But HDTV is not an immediate priority for every operator.
Belgacom, which has 150,000 IPTV subscribers, doesn’t
intend to rollout HDTV until 2009 at the earliest. “Our number
one priority for 2007 is to change customer TV behavior
through education [to embrace the greater functionality that
IPTV can offer compared to cable TV],” says Jean-Charles De
Keyser, chairman of Belgacom Skynet. “We see HDTV as
being niche.”
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