Convergence Telcos and Broadcasters: A Match Made in Heaven? Oddbjørn Bergem, Chief Executive Officer, Nevion

Given the rapid convergence of telecommunications and broadcasting, working together is an inescapable fact of life. Whether the relationship is a forced marriage or a match made in heaven depends largely upon service providers’ ability to address broadcasters’ needs. Further, the more harmoniously both sides work together, the more each will be able to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by rapidly evolving technology in the new converged space.

Now more than ever there is a potential for synergy between broadcasters and telcos that should be explored and maximised. The digitising and packetising of broadcast technology has blown open the door for telcos to work closely with broadcasters and in new ways. With the rise of IP networks as viable high-quality video delivery systems, telcos have new opportunities to gain subscribers, increase revenue and reduce churn. IP networks provide a relatively easy way to move multi-format content, providing the most open, standards-based network, leading to operational savings and rapid adaptation to new requirements. Meanwhile, in addition to solving bandwidth challenges, broadcasters see the potential for new content distribution channels for-and the ability to reach-much wider audiences.

Committing to the relationship

The bandwidth and quality demands of broadcasters are daunting and trending upwards-telcos are the logical companies with the infrastructure to meet them. The structure and integrated nature of telecommunications networks provide potential for even more attractive benefits to broadcasters. Telcos can provide voice, data, and now broadcast signals, on a common network. Telcos can be a single service provider with scalable services and offering transmission for all nodes of the TV transmission chain. Further, broadcasters can take advantage of the guaranteed network performance standards under which telcos operate including Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Quality of Service (QoS) criteria, which are becoming vital to ensuring base-line performance for any video transport technology.

While convergence means streamlined communications for the consumer, it adds technical complexity on some core levels. The signals that broadcasters now send off to telcos are now much more complex. Greater signal variety, more density, and longer distances to travel through many more nodes all imply increased chances of error. Signal transport from one module to multiple locations and content from multiple sources create a risk that errors can multiply when a link goes down.

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Seeing beyond traditional boundaries

To realise the full potential of their partnership with broadcasters, telcos need to avoid picturing their scope as beginning and ending with the boundaries of the network equipment they own. End-to-end quality and signal integrity are critically significant to broadcasters. In order to provide the highest quality possible to end users, telcos and broadcasters need to operate as tightly coupled links in a strong chain of end-to-end video quality. To provide quality assurance for broadcasters, a structure that allows continuous analysis and monitoring in each part of the video chain is needed. System management products now exist that provide not only real-time analysis of the health of the network and monitoring, but also the ability to trace back and pinpoint error sources – often making corrective action possible before service level agreements have been violated. In terms of bandwidth efficiency, when it comes to video compression, the true level of efficiency includes the level of quality delivered to the final destination in the home, not merely the point of delivery to the telco’s customer. The synergistic view takes into account not only image quality after a single encode-decode cycle, but the cumulative effect of every cycle along the way.

Traditionally, the relationship between telcos and broadcasters has been less than picture-perfect as each is wary, unsure of how best to work together and how much trust to put into their mutual understanding. Too often when technology falters or a link in the chain is compromised, or worse, broken, communication can dissolve into fingerpointing. As with any working relationship, parties need to commit to meeting mutually agreed terms, 100% of the time. In supporting Quality of Experience (QoE) initiatives, strict adherence to signal integrity, video monitoring and protection, as well as a procedure for restoring lost service within an expected recovery time, are all necessary. This is where the ability to isolate and document performance at each link in the transport chain becomes invaluable. Deployment of standards-based technology across the board also helps interoperability and eliminates uncertainty.

Transport stream architecture brings wide-ranging benefits

Broadcasters and service providers both benefit from video transport flexibility created by packetised transport streams. The structure of transport streams allows for continuous, real-time remote monitoring and analysis of any payload in the transport chain. Transport streams consist of one or more packetised and multiplexed compressed video signals and their associated audio and ancillary data, along with program descriptors. The flexibility of transport streams to carry wide-ranging signal sizes is one of its greatest advantages. Transport streams can carry compressed signals of any kind-MPEG2, MPEG4, JPEG 2000, H.264-while also providing the ability to multiplex or re-multiplex to create new bundles of programs. By bringing the historically missing control and monitoring to IP, transport stream architecture is paving the way for mass adoption by service providers. Transport streams make it possible for

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