European Cable Operators Are Seeking
Web-to-TV Extension for IPCablecom

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By Fred Dawson

Fred Dawson is principal, Dawson Communications. Dawson Communications publishes the newsletter ScreenPlays and provides consulting and writing services to service providers, suppliers and publications in the broadband sector.

A vision of the future of interactive television taking shape within the European cable community provides a strong rationale for including a link to the TV in the multimedia version of IPCablecom that will eventually emerge from an initiative begun by Cable Television Laboratories.

While U.S. cable operators' pursuit of a multimedia extension of the standard, widely known as PacketCable™ in the U.S., has been focused on creating a viable means of support for delivering advanced broadband data services to the PC, leading European participants in the standards-setting process want to make sure the multimedia extension includes the applications program interfaces (APIs) that would support delivery of Internet content and applications to the television as well. Already, many European operators are providing their digital tier customers set tops with embedded Euro-DOCSIS modems (the European version of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification), and some are looking at introducing Web access via the television as the next phase in their evolution of ITV services.

"The CableLabs initiative to provide PacketCable with a multimedia extension is extremely crucial for us," says Sudhir Ispahani, CTO of UPC Corp., a leading European MSO, and chairman of the European cable CTO group that interfaces with CableLabs, ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) on standards issues. Asked whether he believes inclusion of the TV link in the IPCablecom multimedia extension is essential, Ispahani replies, "Absolutely. We believe the development of a common platform for distribution of multimedia services is where consumers want us to go."

That platform, Ispahani adds, is the set-top terminal, which can serve as the core point of convergence for a complete bundle of triple-play services with multiple tiers that allow operators to tailor services to fit the needs of individual customers. "The ability to offer services to end users whether to the PC or the TV needs to be extremely seamless," he adds. "Unless we create a seamless experience, customers aren't going to be very forgiving."

UPC over the past year has introduced digital services with an interactive component to markets in Austria, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, with 129,000 customers now taking the service, says Toon Diegenant, a spokesman for UPC. Most of the company's 3.4 million subscribers to analog services in those countries now have access to the digital tier, he adds. Subscribers get approximately 40 channels of programming (some of it duplicating the analog channels) with the basic digital tier, along with the interactive services. These include the Interactive Entertainment Guide, e-mail on TV, chat and services such as online games, a dating service, cinema ticket purchases and even a taxi service option. There are premium digital tiers offering additional one-way cable services as well.

But Ispahani acknowledges the company's ITV offering is fairly limited at this point. With a relatively small potential market for interactive cable programming, content suppliers don't have a strong incentive to invest in compelling interactive TV, he notes. Ispahani added that this is why accessing broadband-optimized content from the Web could prove important to enabling a suite of ITV services that are distinct from competitors' services.

UPC is forging ahead in advance of the evolving IPCablecom standards-setting process with plans to expand its interactive TV options with soft commercial launches in selected market areas of TV-based Web browsing, instant messaging and software support for user applications such as electronic postcards. "We have installed the Motorola DVi 5000 digital set tops with embedded Euro-DOCSIS modems, so we are well positioned to deliver Web browsing capabilities to the TV," Ispahani says. UPC intends to test TV Web browsing in different scenarios in order to determine where the consumer demand is strongest for such capabilities. "What's the sense of interest?" Ispahani asks. "We'll look at market environments where there's high PC penetration and ones where the PC penetration is low."

The base of deployed set-tops with Euro-DOCSIS modems built-in is expanding in Europe, according to David Whitehead, director of engineering for Motorola's Broadband Communications Sector in Europe. The lion's share of that deployment is still held by Pace Micro Technology and is focused in the U.K., he adds.

"We're gaining some traction for our products as well now with a few customers elsewhere in Europe deploying set tops with embedded cable modems," Whitehead says. "Most of the deployments of set tops with embedded modems, which is to say in the U.K., have been for purposes of creating an up-sell environment for broadband, where customers can gain access to high-speed Internet service through an Ethernet connection from the set top to the PC," he noted. But now, he added, with deployments like UPC's outside the U.K., there's growing interest in "getting cable modem service to the TV."

Executives at Pace agree, noting that where the up-sell from digital TV to high-speed data service has been the modus operandi for cable operators Telewest and NTL in Britain, it could well go the other way in parts of Europe, including especially Germany and the Netherlands. "Originally our strategy was to sell the high-end set tops with cable modems that enabled the full gambit of services in these countries," says David Novak, vice president of marketing for Pace America. "But charging up front for pay TV in places where people were accustomed to getting TV services for nothing proved to be problematic, which has resulted in more of a data/voice-centric strategy on the part of some operators in those markets."

By offering a competitive high-speed data service and, possibly, IP voice, operators are able to leverage their upgraded networks for payback in the near term while they continue to promote their digital pay services. And, with the cable modems in place, operators also have the opportunity to port broadband-optimized Web content and applications to the TV as they install set tops with connection ports to the cable modems, thereby providing TV access to games and other content that otherwise would be limited to the PC.

"Once the data service is in the home, offering an accessory set top with a data port to the TV can add value to the TV service," Novak says. "We're seeing interest from customers in the ability to access the Web from the TV over broadband - not as much as there is for access from the PC, but more than we're seeing in other markets."

At the same time, Novak adds, some European operators want to be able to selectively capture broadband-optimized Web content and applications in conjunction with revenue-sharing deals they might cut with content suppliers so as to offer an enhanced version of such content to their subscribers. Enhancements might involve bandwidth-on-demand to assure higher quality of service than customers would get over best-effort connectivity as well as formatting of the IP content for TV display, obviating the need to support that processing capability in the set top.

In Britain, where Telewest and NTL have amassed over one million subscribers to cable modem service, the up-sell strategy has been a major success. And, notes Philip Snalune, director of TV services for Telewest, the base of digital TV subscribers who have set tops with Euro-DOCSIS modems built in and plenty of processing power to transcode IP content for TV display represents a ready opportunity to launch Web access to the TV.

But the immediate focus for Telewest where ITV is concerned is on the "walled garden" approach, where the existence of a pervasive amount of interactive content stemming from the "freeview" package of terrestrial broadcast interactive services like those offered by the BBC through its BBCi interactive service and from satellite-delivered networks affords Telewest a solid foundation to build on when it comes to adding its own ITV components. These include access to e-commerce and gaming portals offered exclusively by Telewest, TV-based chat and a text messaging service that allows subscribers away from home to send text messages from their mobile phones to the family via a "ticker tape" data feed across the bottom of the TV screen.

Interactive components to terrestrial and satellite services are popular and growing in number now that the pay TV model fostered by the pioneering and now defunct ITV Digital terrestrial service has been replaced by the freeview model. BBCi, for example, is offering sports events with multiple-view options, allowing viewers to watch all the action on separate screen windows at once, or to go to full-screen display with any of the windows they choose. Such events typically draw participation in the range of 40-50 percent, Snalune says, adding that forty-three percent of Telewest's digital customers accessed the recent broadcast of the Wimbledon tennis tournament by BBCi.

All the freeview programming is built for one-way delivery, but some of it invites viewer participation via return phone lines or, in cable's case, via the return channel over the set-top cable modem. Commercial interests such as Channels 4 and 5, as opposed to the government-funded BBCi, make money on some of these services by charging for viewer participation, as when people vote to determine which of the participants in a reality TV show are to be eliminated from the competition.

For Telewest, however, the ITV service was launched in June 2002 to provide the MSO a way to keep pace with its satellite competitor and to promote its other digital TV services. Viewers gain access to interactive programming components by pushing a red button on their remote controls when they see an on-screen prompt telling them enhanced TV is available. Telewest, like NTL and many other European operators and networks, uses the Liberate Technologies ITV platform, which applies IP-based technologies such as JavaScript, XML and HTML to support a wide range of capabilities built around the client-server model. This makes it easy, for example, to bring a Web site like QVC's shopping site into the walled garden domain in order to make it accessible over the MPEG digital TV stream, thereby extending the range of applications beyond TV-specific fare to material developed for the Web, while capturing the latter within the walled garden for TV access.

But, so far, the options relating to TV-based original interactive content are limited when it comes to giving the cable service unique advantages over the satellite ITV service, owing in part to financial constraints that have prevented Telewest from introducing video on demand in the U.S. mode. Moreover, with just a year in the interactive services business versus several years for the Sky DBS service and a market base of 1.25 million TV customers versus 6.5 million for satellite, Telewest finds broadcasters want to ensure anything they do in the interactive vein is launched over satellite, which makes it tough for Telewest to offer a competing venue of unique network-based interactive services, Snalune says.

"Over the past six to nine months I've made a point of having broadcasters visit us at Telewest to see the (ITV) platform, and one of the themes that has become clear is that broadcasters don't want to launch the services they offer on the satellite platform on our platform as well," Snalune says. "That's not because they don't want to write for two platforms; it's because they understand our platform offers them ways to do more compelling types of interactivity because of the always-on and two-way capabilities of our network." The challenge, though, is the extent to which developers can hope to gain returns from the more limited audience base in cable, which is the same problem that UPC and other European cable operators face as they seek to leverage their interactive platforms into conduits for applications that are distinct from the satellite offerings.

This is where the possibilities of bringing broadband-optimized content from the Web to the TV come into play. With ever more broadband content available, operators recognize that Web content remains an at-hand, low-cost option that could greatly expand the cable advantage over satellite on the TV side of the equation, if they can come up with business models that will lead to new revenues.

While no plans are afoot to deliver Web-based content to the TV, "that's not to say we're not exploring a future scenario where there would be more and more integration between the Web and the TV," Snalune says. "With the set-top boxes we have in place, we already have the capability to do Internet always-on access through the TV. But we haven't launched that because we want to analyze and understand the customer need for such a platform."

A key question is whether the PC owners who take broadband service would have any interest in accessing some Web content via the TV. "I've seen no evidence of interest in seeing such content on TV if people have a PC," Snalune says. Another question is whether Web access via the TV would be sufficiently compelling to persuade non-PC owners to purchase cable modem service. Ongoing research is trying to get an answer to this question, he notes.

But there's another trend afoot that could prove decisive on the issue, which is the combination of home networking over wireless connections to the set-top gateway, where the monitors used for TV or PC access are increasingly decoupled from the receivers and CPUs. As wireless connectivity to the set-top gateway, now being tested by Telewest, gains currency, the portability of devices in the home and the ability to display content on those devices, whether it's from the Web or TV networks, renders the issue moot. "This kind of thing and how it evolves in the home is what we have to understand," Snalune says.

As operators weigh their ITV evolution strategies, the European Cable Communication Association (ECCA) is working through its "Technical Centre of Competence," the Institute for Communications Technology at Braunschweig Technical University in Germany, to develop an approach to extending the IPCablecom multimedia capabilities to the TV. "TV is the key word for what we're doing," says Dirk Jaeger, technical director at ECCA and a member of the research staff at the Braunschweig communications institute. "We're looking at the need for new applications interfaces to accommodate the use of the TV to access Web-based multimedia and advanced applications such as video teleconferencing."

Known as the CASSIC (Compliance Assessment for IP Cable Components) project, the research is funded through a grant from the European Union and other sources with the two-fold aim of determining how IPCablecom can be made suitable for non-VoIP multimedia applications and how the functionality of IPCablecom can be made accessible to services in the TV environment, says Volkel Leisse, the Braunschweig researcher most closely involved in CASSIC. "As to the goal of making IPCablecom suitable for multimedia, we are closely following the PacketCable multimedia initiative at CableLabs, and so our architecture is quite similar to the one defined there," Leisse says. "Our work on the TV side is focused on defining an optional API extension to MHP (the Multimedia Home Platform) to extend the functionality of IPCablecom to the TV." (The Globally Executable MHP (GEM) standard of the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) Project is the set of APIs for controlling the functionalities of digital services in the TV environment that forms the core of the CableLabs OCAP (Open Cable Applications Platform) middleware specifications for digital cable terminals. "We're developing the MHP API to allow MHP controls to work in the TV environment for purposes of establishing a peer-to-peer communication link in a video conference that employs the IPCablecom platform," Leisse explains. "We're working with one of the major contributors to MHP in Germany to create this interface. The final goal of the project is to provide a hardware demonstration that implements the service on a TV set as a way to verify the architectural concept."

While the CASSIC project has not risen to the level of being a standards initiative, it is an important element in the efforts of the European CTOs' group to closely coordinate with CableLabs in the IPCablecom multimedia initiative while ensuring that the multimedia project ultimately produces an extension to the standard that takes European needs for TV connectivity into account, says UPC's Ispahani. "We want to make very sure that our roadmap is not out of sync with CableLabs," he says, adding that he believes the CASSIC project is tracking well with that goal.

As ever more broadband content appears on the Web, the gut feeling of European operators is that they will be best served by opening access to the TV over their DOCSIS pipelines. Gaming is an especially strong early leader in this direction, Ispahani notes. And, with gaming much on the minds of U.S. operators as well, it may well be that the Web-to-TV connection with an IPCablecom-enabled high QoS value-add is well suited for operators everywhere who want to appeal to gamers accustomed to playing video games on their TV sets. If so, the work underway in Europe could well prove to be a valuable contribution to the IPCablecom multimedia initiative begun by CableLabs.

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