Vendors Say They Find Encouragement in Cable’s Tru2way and IPTV Plans
The momentum of interactive TV applications and IPTV in the cable industry has picked up this year and vendors say they are encouraged by what they've seen from operators. “In the movement toward IPTV by a lot of the cable companies that we're dealing with, there’s a reality to it and they are actually starting to talk about time frames and how they are going to do it,” said Ken Lowe, vice president of strategic marketing at Sigma Designs, a video processor chip maker. IPTV offerings from AT&T and other competition are spurring cable operators to move forward with these technologies, Lowe said.
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A consensus in the industry around a two-phase transition to IPTV technology appears to have formed, Lowe said. The initial phase would be to deploy hybrid IPTV-QAM boxes that are capable of receiving new IPTV programming as well as traditional cable programming, he said. That way operators won’t have to scrap all they've invested in head- end and customer-premises equipment. Then, over several years, operators would gradually phase out QAM channels and move to a strictly IP architecture, he said.
Operators are still evaluating the technology and probably won’t make any decisions this year, Lowe said. “It will probably take a year to start getting any sort of deployments going,” with the real volume rolling out in 2011, but operators overseas are moving forward more quickly, Lowe said.
Meanwhile, cable operators are proceeding with tru2way plans, said Jeff Bonin, vice president of Alticast, which makes set-top box middleware, firmware and software. “We're hearing a lot of great things coming out of Cox,” he said. “The outlook from our perspective is fairly positive.” New devices that can use tru2way, formerly OCAP, will hit the market as operators deploy the technology in their headends, Bonin said. “As the operators roll out more and more new devices sand older boxes are replaced by DVRs and new devices, you'll start to see more uptake in consumers homes,” he said.
So far there has not been a great leap forward in the applications for tru2way, Bonin said. “You're not seeing a lot of tremendous advancement yet,” he said. “But some of the things that Comcast is planning and some of the things we've seen from cox really start to push the boundaries of what tru2way can do.”