Solution Brief

Managing Bandwidth and Video Quality Issues While Transitioning to an On Demand Architecture

Cable operators are in the midst of a major transformation of their video business from a static broadcast environment to a highly personalized, “unicast” environment. This transformation began with the introduction of Movies-On-Demand and digital video recorders (DVRs) and is evolving into a “what I want to watch, when I want to watch it” world. The introduction of alternative video providers, alternative video platforms such as streaming Internet sites, and portable video players has served to open customer eyes to the convenience available in video delivery.

In conjunction with the personalization of video is a trend towards increased focus on video quality, specifically through the growing market penetration of high definition televisions. The decrease in price of large size TVs, and corresponding increase in deployment of these TVs, has made even the most casual viewer aware of sub-par video quality.

While in some respects these trends are orthogonal, i.e. the video experience on an iPod is certainly not what one would expect in their home theater, the impact on operators’ networks is the same. The increasing number of high definition (HD) streams, coupled with the ever-increasing number of personal streams will both serve to dramatically increase the bandwidth requirement per user over the coming years. Operators need to change the way they think about the delivery of video streams and take advantage of the latest techniques in digital video processing to maximize the bandwidth of their current networks.

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