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Technology Events BLOG Archive:
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February
29th, 2004 - IP Video I recently visited the CTO, Ray Milius, of Starz Encore in Englewood. Starz is located on the Liberty Media campus in southeastern Denver below the Tech Center. As I drove up to the buildings, I thought I was driving to the county courthouse. The Liberty buildings were made to last and the faux stones that made up the building were over a yard across. These buildings weren't made by a fly-by-night startup, but someone with staying power like John Malone. Starz Encore is owned by Liberty Media and they license movies for an 18 month period, 1 year after the theater release. The release cycle for movies goes something like this: Studios -> Movie Theaters -> DVD and VHS -> Pay-Per-View -> Pay TV -> Archive. Starz Encore falls towards the end of the movie food chain in the Pay TV (subscription based) arena. This puts them in competition with ShowTime and HBO (when HBO actually show a Hollywood movie). After the movies have been at the theaters and on DVD or PPV for considerable time, Starz gets to put the movies out to the masses on a subscription basis. Starz, as they have rebranded themselves, has over a thousand movies in their digital archive at any one time. After their 18 month license, they erase the Betacam SP tapes and send a certification back to the studios to show that they no longer have the tapes. Ray walked into the majestic lobby after I passed through security. Ray appeared as the typical hard nosed engineer who wasn't into cracking jokes. Ray likes to talk tech. He took me on an hour tour of the facility that he designed over 3 years ago. From the Betacam SP tape vault (that's the format that the studios send the movies in), we went into the encoding room. Starz encodes the video in three SD formats and HD. The three Standard Definition (SD) formats are: - SD Format at ~42 Mbps using MPEG-2 - D1 at about 270 Mbps for editing - uncompressed - IP Video at ~ 1.5 Mbps with MPEG-4 or an equivalent H.264 compression technique Starz does alot of promotional spots between movies, so they encode the video for editing in the D1 format. To edit the video in high resolution format, the tape is encoded for a second time at about 270 Mbps. Finally, the tapes are encoded a third time for IP Video applications at about 1.5 Mbps. The IP format is a compressed stream that will let Starz stream or download the movies from the Internet. The D1 content will be edited and then compressed to SD. Starz will feed 10 of these SD signals at about 42 Mbps into a DigiCipher II that will compress these signals into one 6 MHz channel for satellite broadcast. The DigiCipher II is made by Motorola and uses statistical processing to compress the 10 SD signals into MPEG-2 compressed SDTV signals. Up to 12 channels are fed into these $750,000 Mini Computers that are compressed into 1 channel. Here's another little overview: 10 Channels at 42 Mbps -> Digicipher -> 1-6 Mhz Channel that delivers about 36 Mbps of data which contains the 10 multiplexed channels The Digicipher then sends the signal to one of three 8 meter dishes that will broadcast up to an Encore satellite run by PanAmSat. These satellites will then retransmit the signal down to the cable companies or satellite TV companies. The cable companies will send the signals out on their metropolitan HFC networks. The satellite TV companies (DirectTV, Dish, VOOM) will receive the signal and send the signals back up to their own birds that will be transmit it down to your DBS receiver. It's interesting to me that the satellite delivered signals will have taken about a 1 second delay by bouncing up and down to geosynchronous satellites twice. Compare this to the IP video that is encoded once and then sent over fiber optic networks and replicated around the globe. It's an interesting comparison that would lead you and even Ray to the conclusion that the future of video is IP based. Downloading the movies instead of streaming them to the whole continent will eventually be more efficient for people who want to view it at random times. The broadcast model works well though and is an easy way to distribute the video on a continental scale in real time. IP Video won't have the instantaneous reach of satellites for some time. IP Video will let you watch niche content from around the globe that the broadcast model will probably never support. Besides some trials that Starz is working on in IP Video, some other IP Video companies are deploying systems that will become available in May. I'm not talking video for the computer, but video for the TV. Akimbo is a new company that is offering over 10,000 hours of content now. To accomodate any broadband connection, the video needs to be downloaded to the 80 GB disk drive on their box. They'll cram up to 200 hours of video on to the box, so it must encode it at about 860 kbps. They say they are getting this data rate by using Windows Media 9 compression on the Windows CE-2 OS. They claim they have good quality at this low data rate and it has been demonstrated many times. The box only uses a Celeron processor which shows how the CPU plays a minor part in this box when compared to the GPU that does the graphical processing. Akimbo will be one of the first companies that collects content from many providers including: Action Television (offers sports programming, including its flagship
show, "Ski-TV") This is the kind of selection that will grow to 20,000 hours of content by this summer and grow into the millions of hours that can be seen from anywhere on the Internet. That is the dream of Broadband Entertainment. Getting your commercial-free content from anywhere in the world! |
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