Contributed By Ken Morse, Chief Technology Officer, Cisco Service Provider Video Technology Group
It’s probably not all that surprising, given the state of the video marketplace these days, that what’s top of mind for me is the migration of video to IP (Internet Protocol) everything.
At this point, I think we’re all fairly clear on what the end game looks like – pick any definition you favor about “TV Everywhere” and “the four Anys” (anytime, anywhere, any thing, any device). I think we can all agree that that’s where we’re headed.
The challenge now is that so many different paths exist to get there. As usual!, right? Differences between service providers exist for understandable reasons: Starting position (which options were selected for bandwidth creation/preservation?), plant configuration (switched or not?), and economics (what’s the budget?)
As a vendor, one of the bigger challenges in building products for the IP video migration is identifying which elements to put in the toolbox, to support all of the different ways service providers are considering. There’s the QAM termination approach, there’s the “run high-speed data to the hilt” approach, and several other options in the middle.
My view is, serve them all by gradually “virtualizing” the elements in the toolbox. Encapsulate the functionalities of a particular component - whatever it is - and then instantiate those same functionalities on another device.
Tags: cable, cable show, ip video, ken morse, ncta, Service Provider, tv everywhere, video service delivery, videoscape, virtualization
