In case you haven’t gotten your fill of political voicemails and snailmail flyers and are looking for a bigger dose of politics, you’re in luck if you’re in our Illinois, Michigan, Cleveland, or Evansville markets. Tune to Channel 1 and click My Community>Politics On Demand or for Evansville, tune to Channel 701. This special free VOD content will feature several programs on the upcoming elections and will be available through November 2nd. Go check it out if you’re someone who just can’t get enough politics.
Pay-Per View and On Demand Surprise Charges
Ordering Pay-per-View events and On Demand movies is so easy to do over the remote control that anyone can do it. It’s a great convenience. But, it’s not uncommon to receive calls from customers to report that they’ve been billed for pay-per-view or on demand movies they didn’t order. In reality, billing errors like this are very rare. Before equipment leaves the warehouse to be installed in a customer’s home, it’s been refreshed so there’s no possibility that orders from a previous customer somehow remained in the receiver’s memory only to land on the next customer’s bill. And, all receivers have unique serial numbers that are tied specifically to one customer’s account so this link ensures the right customer is getting billed. It’s a very sophisticated accounting and billing process which is why there’s practically no room for error.
So, it’ not surprising, after much thoughtful discussion with a ccr, a customer comes to the realization that even though he or she did not order the movies or event, someone in the household did. The good news is that there’s lots of things you can do avoid the surprise of purchases on your bill that you did not approve such as parental controls, special pins, or changing your ordering limits. If you’d like to learn more, just call us at 1-866-496-9669 to consult with one of our representatives who can explain all the options available to you. With multiple options, you’ll be able to pick one that leaves you with the level of ordering convenience you want while keeping others from ordering without your approval.
Video Servers–DLNA
Over the past couple of weeks, we have discussed a couple of basic approaches to home networking for video–the basic DVR and AppleTV. Both of these approaches work well, but both have different focus and cater to different needs. They are also proprietary, and as such are very simple to configure and operate within the designs of the device, but are single vendor solutions for sure.
Some years ago, a number of manufacturers and industry players determined to define an ad hoc set of standards to allow devices to share digital media. After several iterations, this standard has evolved into what is known as the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), which defines a standard for moving movies, photos, music and other digital media from device to device within the home. DLNA servers store media in one location, and can stream the media to DLNA compliant clients, such as the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and even network-enabled HDTV sets. The idea (if not necessarily the reality) behind DLNA is to simplify video server/client configuration, and create a standards based protocol to move media between devices from different manufacturers.
The cool thing about DLNA is that software, as well as hardware, can function very well within the standard. So garden variety PC’s can act as both servers and clients with the addition of inexpensive software/freeware. Virtually all operating systems are supported to one extent or another.
That said, using PC’s as servers is not the best way to do this in my opinion. It’s expensive to tie up a computer system to function solely as a media server. the best approach is to use either:
1) a Network Attached Storage device (NAS)–This is typically a ethernet accessible hard disk that is assigned an IP address on the network, and is therefore accessible to all clients on the network as well. Since it’s a server topology, all computers on the network can access it to save and retrieve media, and DLNA capable players and TV’s can access the media from the NAS as well. Sometimes the NAS will have a built in router which will allow internet access at one central point through your internet provider. NAS devices are more expensive than comparably sized external hard drives, but have the distinct advantage of being able to be left on 24/7 and not tying up expensive processing resources.
2) a wireless DLNA enabled router with attachable hard drive. Netgear, Cisco, and others build wireless routers that are DLNA savvy, allowing the user to attach one or more external hard disks for storage of media. Essentially, they act very similarly to the NAS, but have the advantage of wireless access and the ability to upgrade or add to hard disk storage as the user’s media libraries increase. Some of these devices (as well as the NAS) are well executed, some are less so. Do make sure you have return privileges for any hardware you purchase.
A couple of NAS/routers to consider:
Netgear’s DLNA Savvy Wireless Router
On these pages, we’ll keep you informed as to developments in the DLNA space. There is momentum building for this standard, and my expectation is that these devices will take hold in multi-computer/video hungry households.
Happy Networking!
Next time–TIVO as a video server/client.
Equipment Life Cycles
I just had a conversation with my colleague Gary Nilsen who had flown down from Chicago to supervise change out of the VOD system in Evansville. Gary supervises our technical video infrastructure for the entire company in a Vice President level capacity, and has personally engineered most of the video infrastructure presently in use within WOW! He was shaking his head, and knowing my friend as I do, I knew he wasn’t having a good day.
The change out of the VOD system was scheduled tonight (03/22/10) within the maintenance window–a major project involving a number of his team and a number of vendors as well. After all was set up, one of the vendors called with a potentially show-stopping issue that they had discovered. This happened after months of planning and making sure that all the details were worked out.
What necessitates an equipment change out? In this case, our current Evansville VOD system is not malfunctioning or unable to deliver product. It is, however, not a consistent customer interface with our other markets, and this factor alone was deemed important enough to spend a substantial 6 figure sum to ensure a better customer experience with VOD.
In fact, usually it is the customer experience that drives technology change. Most of our carrier class equipment is quite reliable–it has to be to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our telephony switches for example have redundant systems to ensure availability of voice services at a 99.999% uptime. Even when equipment must be changed out, redundant systems handle call processing and completion while primary systems are updated or repaired. What that means is that a customer should never experience a call failure unless there is a plant issue (tree falling on line, semi truck hitting utility pole, squirrels chewing through a fiber optic cable–all of these things actually happen more often than you’d think!)
So while there are occasions that true obsolescence or malfunction dictates new technology engineering and installation, it is usually driven by the team’s desire to build a better experience for the customer. This is consistent with our basic philosophy at WOW! and how we feel about the importance of the customer experience. We hope that you sense those “behind the scenes” efforts by a dedicated engineering team.
Until next time….
A new data distribution technology-DOCSIS 3.0
In the world of WOW!, the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) plant (aka “cable) that carries the video signal to homes of our customers also carries high speed data (HSD) and telephone signals as well. Each of these services requires a portion of the bandwidth the cable is able to carry. By far the largest portion of bandwidth is taken up by analog video signals, followed by digital video/HD, high speed data, and finally, telephony.
I’ve discussed before in this column the efficiencies of digital video, of mpeg2 and mpeg4 video codecs that create pristine video while taking minimal bandwidth doing so. My colleague Gary Nilsen also discussed the future of “switched” IP-based video last week. While video is getting more and more efficient using these technologies and others, it still takes the lion’s share of bandwidth in any distribution system, whether it is fiber or coax based. There is increased demand for linear HD content as well as content from niche providers that ultimately may be handled by VOD as Gary discussed last week.
With these video demands in mind, though, it appears to us that demand for faster broadband data access to the internet is inevitable–perhaps even more critical than video. Data usage by our customers has continually risen over the past ten years, and the demand curve is not linear. We’ve been careful to engineer superior access to the internet, accommodating peak usage rather than letting the network limit access to the internet as some of our competitors do.
Some limits, however, are currently imposed by the local HFC plant; current technology widely deployed by WOW! and other cable suppliers offers mainstream HSD products currently at ≤1.5Mbs/3-6 Mbs(upload/download) speeds for individual residential locations–That’s not to say that current products necessarily reflect the maximum speed available to the technology, but there is a very real technical limitation imposed by the technology itself–defined as DOCSIS 2.0. The acronym stands for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, and with its several iterations has been the technical standard embraced for the last dozen years or so to provide High Speed Data services over cable.
Enter DOCSIS 3.0.
This standard defines “channel bonding” technologies which would allow much greater data throughput to each end user on the cable plant–as much as ten to fifteen times the current “mainstream” data rates to individual subscribers are possible with this technology. WOW! has converted roughly 20% of its equipment to support this standard, but it will be some time at least before full deployment is complete. As the data requirements of our customers increase, we will be ready with product and services that support the “need for speed”.
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