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ActiveVideo beefs up Cloud- TV H5 platform Comcast to turn up millions of Wi-Fi hotspots in neighborhoods Continued on page 11 Using subscribers’ home gateways, Comcast plans on booting up millions of Wi-Fi access points for its customers through its neighborhood hot- spot initiative. After trials last year in Penn- sylvania, New Jersey, Northern Virginia and the Washington, D.C. metro area, there are currently more than 100,000 hotspots enabled in customers’ neighborhoods. Those hotspots are separate from the 150,000 nationwide hotspots that are enabled by the CableWiFi Alli- ance that was announced at last year’s Cable Show that allows Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision and Bright House Networks subscribers to roam on each other’s Wi-Fi networks. Comcast’s Tom Nagel, senior vice president of business devel- opment, said the neighborhood hotspot project works by offer- ing private and public Wi-Fi signals on the same gateway. “We’ve been able to add certain feature functionality to the firmware of our devices,” Nagel said. “The way it’s archi- tected is we sort of logically split the modem in two. On the pri- This Technology adds support to insert ads into IP streams. See page 4. 2013 SHOW DAILY ® 1 THE CABLE SHOW 2013 MONDAY, June 10, 2013 THE CABLE SHOW DAY ActiveVi- deo has shifted its cloud plat- form into overdrive with the recent an- nouncement that it can deliver TV as an application over IP along with the news that it’s behind Charter Communications’ cloud-based user interface. ActiveVideo also said it has partnered with Sumi- tomo Corporation to target cloud-based deployments in Japan and in the Asia-Pacific market. Sumitomo owns a 50 percent stake in J:Com, the latter of which is the largest cable operator in Japan. ActiveVideo also an- nounced it was enlisted to build more interactive applications for Cablevi- sion, but didn’t provide any additional details. On the product front, ActiveVideo has updated its CloudTV H5 platform to help service providers and content aggregators deliver content and user Comcast continued on page 7 Nemani Comcast’s neighborhood hotspot project is live in cities such as Washington D.C. Comcast’s Stemper takes care of business Bill Stemper, president of Comcast Business Services, will spend part of the Cable Show in Washington D.C. being hon- ored by his peers in the cable industry. After a 30-year-career in cable, Stemper chalked up a win in the National Cable & Tele- communications Association’s Vanguard Awards in the cable operations and manage- ment category. The 2013 Van- guard Awards will be presented on Wednesday from 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 during a reception and awards ceremony in room 146. Under Stemper’s direction, Comcast Business Services, which offers Internet, Ethernet, voice, video, and other products and services, has been on an upward arch revenue-wise. The division’s revenue has consis- tently increased 40 percent to percent a year — from $265 million in 2006 to $2.4 billion in 2012. In its recent first quar- ter earnings results, Comcast reported a 27 percent increase in its business services revenue over the same quarter a year ago. Prior to Comcast, Stemper served as vice president of Cox Business Services for Cox Communications in Atlanta, Continued on page 8

Transcript of T H E C A B L E S H O W SHOW 2013 THE CABLE 1 …...QAM circuitry directly into the CMTS. Casa’s...

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ActiveVideo beefs up Cloud-TV H5 platform

Comcast to turn up millions of Wi-Fi hotspots in neighborhoods

Continued on page 11

Using subscribers’ home gateways, Comcast plans on booting up millions of Wi-Fi access points for its customers through its neighborhood hot-spot initiative.

After trials last year in Penn-sylvania, New Jersey, Northern Virginia and the Washington, D.C. metro area, there are currently more than 100,000 hotspots enabled in customers’ neighborhoods. Those hotspots are separate from the 150,000 nationwide hotspots that are

enabled by the CableWiFi Alli-ance that was announced at last year’s Cable Show that allows Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision and Bright House Networks subscribers to roam on each other’s Wi-Fi networks.

Comcast’s Tom Nagel, senior vice president of business devel-opment, said the neighborhood hotspot project works by offer-ing private and public Wi-Fi signals on the same gateway.

“We’ve been able to add certain feature functionality to the firmware of our devices,” Nagel said. “The way it’s archi-tected is we sort of logically split the modem in two. On the pri-

This Technology adds support to insert ads into IP streams. See page 4.

2 0 1 3 S H O W D A I L Y

® 1THE CABLE SHOW 2013

MONDAY, June 10, 2013

T H E C A B L E S H O W

DAY

ActiveVi-deo has shifted its cloud plat-form into overdrive with the recent an-nouncement that it can deliver TV as an application over IP along with the news that it’s behind Charter Communications’ cloud-based user interface.

ActiveVideo also said it has partnered with Sumi-tomo Corporation to target cloud-based deployments in Japan and in the Asia-Pacific market. Sumitomo owns a 50 percent stake in J:Com, the latter of which is the largest cable operator in Japan.

ActiveVideo also an-nounced it was enlisted to build more interactive applications for Cablevi-sion, but didn’t provide any additional details.

On the product front, ActiveVideo has updated its CloudTV H5 platform to help service providers and content aggregators deliver content and user

Comcast continued on page 7

Nemani

Comcast’s neighborhood hotspot project is live in cities such as Washington D.C.

Comcast’s Stemper takes care of businessBill Stemper, president of

Comcast Business Services, will spend part of the Cable Show in Washington D.C. being hon-ored by his peers in the cable industry. After a 30-year-career

in cable, Stemper chalked up a win in the National Cable & Tele-communications Association’s

Vanguard Awards in the

cable operations and manage-ment category. The 2013 Van-guard Awards will be presented on Wednesday from 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 during a reception and awards ceremony in room 146.

Under Stemper’s direction, Comcast Business Services, which offers Internet, Ethernet, voice, video, and other products and services, has been on an upward arch revenue-wise. The division’s revenue has consis-tently increased 40 percent to percent a year — from $265

million in 2006 to $2.4 billion in 2012. In its recent first quar-ter earnings results, Comcast reported a 27 percent increase in its business services revenue over the same quarter a year ago.

Prior to Comcast, Stemper served as vice president of Cox Business Services for Cox Communications in Atlanta,

Continued on page 8

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�Complete conference coverage atwww.CEDmagazine.com THE CABLE SHOW Show Daily Day One June 10, 2013 �

Visible World, FourthWall Media partner on targeted ads

Visible World and Fourth Wall Media have joined forces to create an addres-sable advertising platform for one-to-one set-top box targeting.

Addressable, or targeted, advertising has been a slow train coming for cable operators, ad agencies and advertisers, but the deal between Visible World and FourthWall will helps enable delivering the right ad to the right viewer. Terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed.

Specifically, FourthWall is extending the capabilities of its EBIF platform to support Visible World’s addressable advertising offerings. FourthWall’s platform runs on Motorola, Cisco, and Pace hardware and is deployed in millions of homes with numerous cable operators, including Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications and Bright House Networks.

“Platform technology and set top box viewing data are critical for marketers to better reach their customers with the right message at the right time,” said Bill Feininger, general manager, MassiveData and senior vice president, media measurement for FourthWall. “We

are pleased to be further connecting the dots from our platform, to census-level measurement, and now to addressable advertising with Visible World.

Through the partnership, Visible World can turn on addressable advertising for the operators running the extended FourthWall platform and dramatically improve advertising effectiveness for the participating operators.

“Being able to target the right message to the right home is the single biggest opportunity awaiting the television advertising industry,” said Seth Haberman, CEO of Visible World. “Cable operators further benefit as they use significant local inventory for marketing their own products to existing subscribers. In a study we recently completed, examining 144 cable operator marketing campaigns covering an 18 month period, we found that ads that targeted their message to the right subscribers got a 70 percent better conversion rate than their overall campaign results.” n

Visible World is located in the CableNet Pavilion.

Casa Systems introduced its first CMTS built from the ground up to be CCAP compliant. When fully loaded, the C100G can support 8,000 downstreams.

The new Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) architecture pulls universal QAM circuitry directly into the CMTS.

Casa’s C100G is a highly available, fully redundant, integrated CCAP (I-CCAP) platform does exactly what CCAP was meant to do: it enables MSOs to deploy MPEG video, IP video (IPTV) and/or DOCSIS broadband over any single port.

There are multiple benefits to the approach, including giving cable operators a means to gradually shift to all-IP video, and enabling the consolidation of equipment in overcrowded (and overheated) headends.

The new C100G occupies 13 rack units; its predecessor, the C10G, filled out 12. It

is built with a modular design; the modules includes: downstream module (DS8X96); switching module (SMM8X10G); and the existing upstream module (US16X4).

At 8,000 downstreams, Casa is claiming the industry’s highest density. The company is also claiming its new system consumes the lowest average power per channel, minimizing both expenses and space requirements in the cable head end.

One customer tested a configuration of the C100G with 1,500 downstream channels, and found it generated about 125 percent of the heat. With the comparison to the C10G, Mark Sumner, Casa’s VP of marketing and business development, said “So that’s a 25 percent increase in power with a 4X increase in the number of channels, and all in a system only one rack-unit taller.”

For customers of the C10G, modules can

swapped with the C100G. The software is also backwards-compatible, Sumner said.

“You can put four cards in the C10G before it makes sense to switch to the new chassis,” Sumner noted, “so you can upgrade gracefully if you want, and of course the old cards work in the new chassis.” n

Casa Systems is in booth 3617.

Casa Systems debuts CCAP platform

Casa Systems’ new C100G CMTS built for CCAP.

Great Lakes Data Systems (GLDS) an-nounced at The Cable Show this morning that Click! Network and BCI Broadband have signed on to use its subscriber man-agement, billing provisioning and work-force management products.

Click! Network, one the nation’s largest municipally owned networks, converted from CSG Systems to GLDS earlier this year.

BCI Broadband, recently completed the acquisition of Allegiance Communica-tions, an existing GLDS customer. As a result, BCI Broadband entered into a new multi-year agreement with GLDS expand-ing the scope of the relationship between both parties.

Both Click! and BCI are using GLDS’ WinCable, SuperController and Win-Force solutions.

“While dozens of operators select Win-Cable each year, the vote of confidence from these important operators is notewor-thy and validates the growing demand from broadband operators for easy-to-use, field-proven customer management solutions,” said Garrick Russell, president, GLDS. n

GLDS is located in booth 3225.

GLDS adds BCI, Click! Network to customer lineup

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This Technology’s new ACDS manages blackout events

Advanced advertis-ing vendor This Tech-nology announced today that it has up-dated its Alternate Content Delivery System (ACDS) for managing blackout events to also dynam-ically insert ads into linear IP streams.

Available now, This Technology’s ACDS supports a range of industry standards and enables cable operators and programmers to configure, manage and control alternate content events in both IP and QAM-based environments.

“MVPDs need to be able to duplicate functionality across their QAM and IP networks

and providing alternate content delivery is a key part of that,” said Dave Fellows, former Comcast CTO and This Technology technical advisory board chair. “This Technology was an early mover in this

market and has grown its in-novative solutions to a place where they can scale to meet any deployment scenario.”

ACDS provides real-time alternate content decisions that permit or restrict users for specific broadcast events, such as regional or local black-outs. It helps MVPDs support geographic and other area

determination policies, as well as enforcement of alternate con-tent event schedules that can be provided by programming net-works using a simple provision-ing interface. The ACDS can integrate with This Technology’s DAI platforms to dynamically insert ads directly into alternate content delivery streams.

“This Technology pio-neered the DAI and alternate content delivery markets with innovative solutions that have

served the largest MVPDs and programming networks in linear and time-shifted IP environments,” said This Technology CEO Jeff Sherwin. “The next step in advancing alternate content delivery is the ability to dynamically in-sert ads within those streams and our customers can take advantage of that capability at scale today.” n

This Technology is located in booth 3624.

Complete conference coverage atwww.CEDmagazine.comTHE CABLE SHOW Show Daily Day One June 10, 2013�

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This Technology adds support to insert ads into IPstreams

Sherwin

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CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF THIS YEAR’S VANGUARD WINNERS

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While at NCTA, come see us at Booth #933to discover more of the set top you imagine.

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Complete conference coverage atwww.CEDmagazine.com� THE CABLE SHOW Show Daily Day One June 10, 2013

BlackArrow targets ads to IP devices, forges new partnershipsBlackArrow announced the availability

of a new product, BlackArrow Linear, which will help cable operators extend live and linear TV programming into IP devices.

In tandem with the new product release, BlackArrow also announced partnerships with encoding, transcoding and packaging vendors to create an ecosystem for splicing ads into the live streams. The vendors that work with BlackArrow Linear are Elemental, Envivio, RGB Networks and SeaWell Networks.

According to Chris Hock, senior vice president, product management and marketing for BlackArrow, BlackArrow Linear helps cable operators enable two trends. The first is cable operator subscribers want to be able to watch video whenever and wherever they want on various multi-screen devices.

The second trend is the emergence of new technologies, such as MPEG Dash, ESNI and ESAM interfaces, and the continued improvement in the SCTE 130 and SCTE 35 standards.

“We’re starting to see that IP is a real platform for delivering TV video services in a way that’s more flexible and less costly for operators,” Hock said. “Those two trends are causing operators to look at how they can start standing up services for delivering their TV programming to IP-based devices.

“That’s why we’ve announced the new product Black Arrow Linear, which we started working on in 2012. Basically this is a software solution that helps pay TV operators control the insertion of not only ads but also of alternative content, such as blackouts, into TV streams going to IP.”

Working with its vendor partners, BlackArrow Linear enables dynamic ad insertion (DAI) of local and national ads within linear streams into the various device endpoints. The signaling of how to package the streams is handled in an ESAM format between BlackArrow

and the component vendors. Up in the network, a manifest proxy handles the duties of ad insertion and encrypting streams for each client and each device.

“We also have capabilities in BlackArrow Linear to understand the original broadcast schedule lineup and which ads are on broadcast TV and replicate those ads if the operator wants to do that, so that feature is called linear replication,” Hock said. “We also have capabilities to do alternate content for blackout support. This is important as pay TV operators take traditional capabilities for broadcast TV and now put them over IP platforms. They have to have parity and supporting blackouts is one of those capabilities.”

Working with other BlackArrow pro-ducts, such as BlackArrow Audience, Black-Arrow Linear helps cable operators monetize their ad opportunities across both live and on demand viewing on any screen. n

BlackArrow is located in the CableNet Pavilion.

Edgeware has added a feature to its video delivery platform that it says allows cable operators to dispense with separate and costly load balancing systems.

Edgeware’s Origin Selector option for its Distributed Video Delivery Network (D-VDN) Solution provides scalable load balancing and redundancy across multiple video origin servers, located in either the service provider’s own headend or in an external content provider’s network, the company said.

The Origin Selector option in the Edgeware D-VDN Solution enables intelligent distribution of content collection requests over multiple origin servers, obviating the need for load balancers.

Origin servers can be grouped into virtual clusters and can be co-located or geographically distributed. All cache-miss requests from the D-VDN are spread across these virtual clusters to provide scale and redundancy.

Therefore if an origin server becomes unavailable, collection requests are instantly re-routed to an alternative node within the virtual cluster without interruption of the service. Fallback is instantaneous when the failed node is re-instated, Edgeware said.

The approach addresses a common situation, Edgeware explained. Most multiscreen TV and video services today

make use of adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming to achieve uninterrupted viewing over wireless connections or unmanaged networks. In this environment, content is first transcoded, packaged and encrypted before publication to origin servers. Then, the video delivery network (VDN) typically collects content from these origin servers for delivery to consumers.

However, as traffic levels grow, origin servers can quickly become a bottleneck, especially for live channels where they are required to simultaneously receive and deliver multiple contiguous streams. The typical solution has been to employ load balancers to distribute traffic over clusters of multiple origin servers and ensure redundancy in the event of a node failure.

If a layer of caching servers have already been deployed in the headend to accelerate on-demand requests from the origin servers, the Origin Selector can be used in conjunction with Edgeware’s content-aware clustering to distribute on-demand cache-miss requests according to content. With this combination, the storage in each headend cache is effectively combined. This increases its effectiveness and provides further origin offload, especially for large video on demand (VOD) back catalogues or catch-up TV archives, Edgeware explained. n

Edgeware feature replaces load balancers

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vate side, you still get the same things. You can do your own security, you can manage, you can do port forwarding and all of the things that no one really understands but it’s available to you.

“On the public side what happens is it’s logically a separate network. We actually provision a separate service flow to that cable modem for the public side. If that public side uses up what we’ve given them, there is no getting from someone else.”

The neighborhood hotspots currently can only be accessed by Xfinity broad-band subscribers. Nagel said Comcast has educated users that having a public network provisioned from their home gateways won’t impact their own speeds.

“On the private side if you’re a Blast customer, and for us Blast is a 50 Mbps customer, with public side open and with someone on it, you’ll still be a 50 Mbps customer,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we addressed it up front so that people would be comfortable with it. We

made sure we could provision separately, and that we could provide different ser-vice flows and therefore manage it differ-ently and that there would be no leakage from the public to the private on the broadband piece.

“There’s also no leakage of the public and private security functions as well. We do two totally different security regimes in the box and there’s really no way to get in between the two.”

The neighborhood hot spots work with Comcast’s XB2 and XB3 wire-less gateways, the latter of which was announced in April, that broadcast two wireless signals. The XB3 gateway features include: a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem; a dual-band 802.11n wireless router with concurrent 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz radio frequencies; and VoIP adapter.

The range of the public Wi-Fi net-works can vary based on terrain and the materials, such as brick, that were used to build a home, but Nagel said a radius of 250- to 300 feet was about average. The

wireless gateways rent for $7 a month and there’s no additional charge for enabling the public networks.

“We do provide people the ability to opt out of the service but there have been, very few people that have done that, like sub fractions of 1 percent,” Nagel said. “We believe that as we’ve gotten to this point it’s really a good news story. Cus-tomers like it, they’re using it and there’s really no call volume around it saying they don’t like it or don’t want to use it.

“For the most part, the installation is a non-event, which is exactly what we wanted it to be, and yet the use is really taking up. It’s all a happy story.”

Comcast’s XfinityWiFi is a value-add-ed service to its broadband tiers. While Comcast doesn’t charge to use the service, it’s a means to reduce churn while en-abling mobile broadband on smartphones and other devices.

Comcast, which is opening up its Wi-Fi metro access points for free to non-custom-ers across its footprint until July 4, could

Comcast continued from page 1

Comcast continued on page 11

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Complete conference coverage atwww.CEDmagazine.com�

where he more than doubled the size of its business market in less than three years. He also held executive positions for AT&T that were focused on serving the needs of business customers in the United States and Europe.

Prior to the Cable Show, CED's Mike Robuck interviewed Stemper about winning the award and his company’s list of accom-plishments in the commercial services sector.

CED: Were you surprised to hear that you were a Vanguard Award Winner? Who told you the news? Stemper: I was very surprised when I heard the news. I was informed by NCTA and my boss (Comcast chief operating officer and executive vice president) Dave Watson, just recently. I think that this Vanguard Award is really a testament to the hard work by our entire team at Comcast Business and across all the MSOs.

CED: Comcast was a little late to the business services game, was that because it wanted to make sure it had the infrastructure in place, such as the fiber backbone, before offering the services? Stemper: Our philosophy at Comcast is to make sure that we first have the network infrastructure and best technology in place, that we have the service and support and sales team in place, and that everything is running smoothly before we go out and actively promote and sell those services in the marketplace. We take a very deliberate, focused approach. Building on our long history in the residential market, we started in the business market years ago by providing services to small businesses, and after successfully establishing ourselves in that space, we have moved up market to mid-sized businesses with solutions such as our Ethernet and cloud-based voice services.

CED: Comcast Business Services’ recipe for success; 140,000 miles of fiber over a private network, last mile connectivity, 24/7 NOCs, customer service, did I miss anything? Stemper: This allows us to deliver outstanding products with great value. Businesses thrive using our services and

are eager to spread the word.I think another key to our success is

having a significant local presence in 20 of the top 25 markets in the U.S. Our regional structure places top executives in every market with a strong customer-facing sales and service team.

We continue to increase the reach of our fiber network within each of those markets. Also, we continue to strive to reach more customers within our footprint and bring them the benefit of fiber-based services like high-performance Ethernet, voice and cloud services. And, we recently upgraded our backbone from 40G to 100G, so we have the capacity to serve our growing customer base both now and in the future.

CED: It must take a great deal of due diligence in order to be able to serve small-and-medium-sized businesses with the right level of service?Stemper: When we looked at the market, we saw that the large telecom providers were focusing their attention on very large corporations and the enterprise market, and were not giving much attention to the small and mid-market. We saw the mid-market and SMB as a great opportunity. Comcast has established a strong local presence in each of our major markets to provide the “front line” support to customers right in their own backyard, and this enabled us to service customers more quickly, build better relationships and be more proactive in our sales efforts. In addition, Comcast Business has a dedicated service and support team – and sales team – that is exclusively for SMB customers. It includes both dedicated 24/7 phone support and field technicians. The team has over 8,000 professionals who are dedicated to meeting the needs of small- and medium-sized businesses. This focus is another key to providing the right level of service to SMB customers.

CED: Comcast Business Services expanded its suite of services in two areas this year; the Upware portal and Comcast Business Hospitality, what were the development curves for each? Stemper: Comcast knows SMBs well from the number of years we have provided

SMB customers broadband, voice and TV services. We expanded our SMB solutions by adding Signature Support, an advanced tech support program for small businesses, in 2012. Also, we know the cloud well from offering Business VoiceEdge, a cloud-based hosted PBX solution, and offering cloud-based services like hosted Microsoft Exchange. That combination of SMB knowledge and cloud knowledge made us well positioned to develop and offer Upware.

For Comcast Business Hospitality, we already had experience working with hospitality customers on a one-on-one basis, so we were able to develop a hospitality solution quickly and tailor it to the specific needs of hotels, motels, resorts, bars and restaurants. Our ability to provide data, voice and TV service in one package, having one number to call for service and support, and having the ability to simultaneously service both the back-office and the guest-facing aspects of a hospitality business, makes it an attractive offering for hospitality customers.

CED: As a way to migrate into the medium-sized business sector, Comcast Business Services launched its Metro Ethernet services in 2011, what have been some of the keys to success for these Ethernet-based services, and where do they evolve over the next few years? Stemper: These services have been successful at meeting the needs of customers in “bandwidth hungry” industries, such as education, healthcare and government, but also with any type of customer that is moving a great deal of data, video and/or voice traffic. In the future, I think that you will see more customers use our full line of Ethernet service offerings, like our Ethernet Private Line (EPL), Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) and Ethernet Network Service (ENS). These services provide point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and “any to any” connectivity, and are a great solution for organizations with multiple sites in a metro area or for campus scenarios.

CED: There have been a lot customer wins for your Ethernet services, are there a couple that surprised you, or maybe

Continued from page 1

THE CABLE SHOW Show Daily Day One June 10, 2013

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that you hadn’t thought of back when it was in the planning stage? Stemper: What has particularly surprised me are the Ethernet projects that we have done for professional sports teams in the past two years. For example, we announced projects with the Washington Nationals in April, the Boston Celtics in December 2012, the Philadelphia Phillies in July 2012 and the Boston Red Sox in April 2012. These teams move a lot of traffic, ranging from scouting videos, to photos from the press box, to delivering HD images to the giant scoreboards in their stadiums, to supporting in-stadium Wi-Fi networks for their fans. They need a lot of bandwidth, so Ethernet is a great solution for them.

CED: How does Comcast Business Services move up into the enterprise sector? Stemper: While it may depend on what your definition of enterprise is, in many ways we are already serving this market with customers in the healthcare and financial services markets that have many locations and hundreds or thousands of employees. These types of customers have turned to Comcast Business for high-performance Ethernet services to help run their businesses. As always, we plan to continue improving our services to meet customer needs, so examples might be connecting more data centers, or doing Ethernet exchanges, as well as offering Ethernet services that span across our different regions.

CED: Are cable operators starting to inter-connect on business services offerings in order to keep customers within the cable family across the various footprints? Is there more MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) certification that needs to be done on inter-connects? Stemper: The MEF is doing a good job at driving their Carrier Ethernet 2.0 (CE 2.0) certification, which will help facilitate and standardize the way cable operators work together. Comcast has an executive on the board of the MEF and was the first company to gain CE 2.0 certification, and we are very much in favor of the standard. We were also the first company to earn all three MEF CE 1.0 certifications.

CED: What’s next for the telephony and video sides of Comcast Business Services? Stemper: Comcast Business VoiceEdge, which is a cloud-based hosted PBX service that we launched in 2012, is gaining traction in the market and is a good alternative for mid-sized organizations that are looking to replace their legacy PBX equipment or add unified communications features without having on-site equipment. This can make life easier for business owners who don’t want to worry about purchasing and maintaining on-site phone equipment. Everything is done in the cloud with Business VoiceEdge. In the future, we will be adding more mobility features to VoiceEdge, which will make it even

more valuable to organizations that have mobile, “on the go” employees.

CED: Business services are already on the evolutionary path to IP, what roles will DOCSIS 3.1 and CCAP play on the commercial services side? Stemper: The combination of fiber and coax in our network gives us tremendous reach in all of the markets in our national footprint, so standards such as DOCSIS 3.1 and CCAP will further enable us to utilize our hybrid network to deliver high-bandwidth services to our customers.

CED: Who have some of your mentors been in the cable industry during your career? Stemper: Mentoring and executive guidance are hallmark characteristics of the cable industry. I have and have had some of the greatest people as mentors. At Comcast, there is not an executive that is not influencing my leadership approach. Dave Watson and (Comcast Cable President and CEO) Neil Smit are invaluable mentors helping me think and influencing me by their example. (Comcast chief financial officer and vice chairman) Mike Angelakis’ perspective has always helped me think better and with greater perspective. When I first joined Cox, I was also impressed with the positive support and guidance from folks like (Cox Communications President) Pat Esser and (Cox Enterprises chief operat-ing officer) John Dyer. n

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Complete conference coverage atwww.CEDmagazine.com10 THE CABLE SHOW Show Daily Day One June 10, 2013

Aurora Networks is debuting a network architecture, based on its Node QAM technology, that gives operators greater flexibility to preserve existing infrastructure investment while creating a path for future network enhancements.

Aurora’s Distributed Broadband Access Architecture extends the digital headend domain by migrating the digital-RF interface – ordinarily in the headend – to the node, carrying digital content to the node using baseband, data-grade optics and distributing QAM modulation to the nodes.

Aurora Networks’ distributed broadband access architecture is capable of delivering any mix of services, including broadcast, narrowcast, cable IPTV, and DOCSIS – even in the same QAM channel. This capability enables operators to tailor service migration and growth to local needs and specifications.

“Operators will continue to see an increased demand for capacity, but in order to add premium services and maintain cost efficiency, they need to implement a Distributed Broadband Access Architecture,” said John Dahlquist, vice president of marketing, Aurora Networks. “This solution allows operators to simplify the cost and complexity of their networks and when combined with the Node QAM, there is no better solution positioned to save operators money, and simultaneously, solving the ever increasing bandwidth challenge.”

The company is also displaying for the first time in North America its new optical beat interference (OBI)-free RFoG solution, as well as the former Harmonic optical transmission product line. n

Aurora Networks is in the CableNET Pavilion.

Aurora Networks announces Distributed Broadband Access Architecture

CED’s

Live From The Show

• Deluxe Digital Distribution

• Cycle30

• SeaChange International

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• National Cable &

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Check out the Live From

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Being fi lmed at The Cable Show 2013

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Synacor tunes up TVE demos

Synacor is showcasing its multi-screen offerings at The Cable Show this week, which includes demonstrating the new ca-pabilities of its Cloud ID Social Login.

Cloud ID Social Login gives Synacor customers the flexibility to offer subscribers access to online pay-TV content with their favorite social accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, while simultaneously authorizing with the subscriber’s pay-TV provider or billing account.

Synacor’s Carbyn Cross-Device platform, also on display, provides customers a branded platform where their subscribers can enjoy a variety of entertainment content and HTML5 apps including video, music, games, and newspapers, all in one place by signing into their subscriber account on any device, re-gardless of OS, including Apple iOS, Google Android or Microsoft Windows. n

Synacor is located in booth 1241.

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11Complete conference coverage atwww.CEDmagazine.com THE CABLE SHOW Show Daily Day One June 10, 2013 11

Deluxe Digital and Arris have collabo-rated to use the latter’s encryption system to protect delivery of video assets in the former’s on-demand library.

Deluxe Digital provides multi-screen on-demand delivery as a managed ser-vice. Through its new arrangement with Arris, its library of over 40,000 VOD titles will be encrypted with Arris Secure-Media HLS+.

Multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) and over-the-top (OTT) service providers will be able to use their own brands on the on-demand delivery service. By relying on Deluxe Digital’s cloud-based delivery of pre-packaged and pre-encrypted video, they can reduce their own operational com-plexity and costs.

The Deluxe OnDemand library in-cluded new Hollywood releases, block-buster titles, popular television series,

classics and more. Arris SecureMedia HLS+ enables secure adaptive bit-rate content distribution to a wide range of devices including iOS smartphones and tablets, Android smartphones and tab-lets, game consoles, connected TVs and Blu-ray players, Roku and PCs/Macs.

Kevin Corbett, president of Deluxe Digital Distribution, said, “With AR-RIS SecureMedia solution, we are able to streamline the delivery of content, enabling operators to free up valuable resources while still delivering the best content at the highest quality to their customers.”

SecureMedia HLS+ has been de-ployed by service providers around the world and is approved by all major Hol-lywood studios and leading programmers for content security. n

Deluxe Digital and Arris are in Booth 3815.

Deluxe Digital secures content with Arris encryption system

interfaces from the Charter Commu-nications has had its cloud-based UI in the works for sometime, but hadn’t disclosed it was working with ActiveVi-deo until today’s announcement. In last month’s first quarter earnings call,

Charter CEO and President Tom Rut-ledge said the cloud-based UI was one of his company’s top priorities this year. When Rutledge was COO of Cablevi-sion, his team signed up with ActiveVi-deo to deliver apps from the cloud to subscribers. n

ActiveVideo continued from page 1

Comcast continued from page 7

eventually allow other cable subscribers access on the neighborhood hotspots.

“I’m actually migrating between backoffices,” Nagel said. “The one that is on the home hotspot, that’s my future back office so somewhere be-tween now and the end of the year the metro and retail will move over to that. I can’t manage them the same way right now, but next year you’ll see all of these open up.”

Comcast’s over-arcing Wi-Fi strategyThe neighborhood hotspots are the

third leg of Comcast’s Wi-Fi strategy. Metro hotspots, which hang on Com-cast’s strands, are enabled in about eight markets to date with more on the way.

Through Comcast Business, retail businesses, such as coffee shops, restau-rants, bars, and other merchants, can offer Wi-Fi services to their customers.

“Step one was to get good coverage in places that people expected, which we do with our metro hotspots,” Nagel said. “No. 2 was get good coverage where people were, which is what I call dwell locations. The last part is to get good cov-erage almost anywhere we can, which is the neighborhoods.

“In the end the goal would be to have the fasted Wi-Fi network and the most locations, carrying as much broadband traffic for the consumer as possible. That’s the structure we’re looking for.” n

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Simplifying Multiscreen Content DeliveryDeluxe OnDemand is revolutionizing digital home entertainment with its leading multiscreen-ready, studio quality video catalog service. The cloud-based solution easily integrates with your VOD ecosystem and simplifies the access and delivery of titles.

Copyright ©2013 Deluxe Entertainment

Deluxe OnDemand features an impressive catalog of high quality content, pre-encoded and prepackaged with popular DRMs, and compressed to save space and bandwidth. Quickly add new services, support more devices, and deliver more compelling content to the set-top box and multiscreen viewing experiences without the upfront investment in time and resources.

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