Cable killers

Brent Meldrum, S² Entertainment's acting vice president of engineering and technology, has the kind of swashbuckling attitude that's in short supply in today's cautious telecom environment.

Meldrum is pushing the limits with a video-over-very high bit rate DSL (VDSL) system that he calls a “cable-killer product.” S² culls video content at a regional headend, processes it and adds in other features such as video-on-demand, private video recording capability, local ad insertion and channels (see figure). Then the company uses high-speed connectivity to push the package to smaller headends that use VDSL for last-mile consumer delivery.

S²'s first regional headend in the Seattle area will use third-generation technology from VideoTele.com (VT.C) to aggregate and groom content into high-quality material that exceeds what's available from direct broadcast satellite and cable systems, Meldrum said.

VT.C's equipment plays the key role, said Doug Shafer, VT.C's CEO. The product brings quality of service capabilities to the process of preparing content from multiple sources, making it easier to deliver “over a non-traditional, non-cable network into the home.”

“The main challenge for us is to provide a content-processing solution that can handle significant quantities of all those different types of content sources and deliver them to the home over some sort of broadband network. The net result is an entirely new headend delivery platform,” Shafer said.

The cable killers are the quality and amount of content VT.C's gear can aggregate, groom and deliver, Meldrum said. And, of course, the fact that the VDSL network delivers more than just video entertainment.

“Because we're going into the home with at least 15 Mb/s to 25 Mb/s service, you have your lifeline POTS coming in, your 1.5 Mb/s for your high-speed [data] connectivity and at least 9 Mb/s for two independent video channels,” Meldrum said. “We use the VT.C hardware to groom [incoming content] so that we come out with a very consistent broadcast-quality service.”

Satellite typically digitally encodes MPEG-2 at 3 Mb/s; broadcast is 4 Mb/s minimum, he said. “We're going to be delivering the signals at 4.5 Mb/s, which means that they are full DVD broadcast quality.”

S² uses the switched network to swamp the competition with its content.

“Going to a fully digital, switched capability gives us the ability to provide almost infinite content,” Meldrum said. “VDSL and IP transport supports the switched network, allowing us to be a whole lot more flexible than the normal cable [hybrid fiber/coax] environment because in HFC you have a finite amount of bandwidth.”

Infinite bandwidth means infinite possibilities — such as letting broadcasters use their digital spectrum for multichannel delivery. Cable operators continue to resist multichannel carriage as a “must-carry” provision.

“We work with the broadcasters very closely, and we're voluntarily doing a must-carry of all their capability because to us it's content,” said Meldrum.

Content is data.

Competitive and incumbent local exchange carriers are “already doing the data capability and the telephone capability, so now we can come in with end-to-end video,” Meldrum said. “We own all the hardware from the aggregation and the content all the way through what goes into the customer home, the set-top box.”