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Is digital TV home networking finally prime time?

There’s a lot of buzz about giving control of content to the end user to provide a ‘connected home’ experience. Home networks used to focus on connecting computers – now it’s about media. Everyone’s heard of the home of the future where all devices are synched to your content to overcome time and location boundaries.

Some of the issues behind this include getting each device to talk to each other (ie overcoming or implementing standards), and guaranteeing protection to content owners while at the same time improving the experience for consumers.

Philippe Stransky, senior vice president and chief architect, and Ivan Verbesselt, senior vice president, marketing of Nagravision outline whether the industry is ready to offer converged home networking – content consumption across multiple devices.

 

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The idea of making content available for consumption across multiple devices isn’t that new. But are the market and the end user really ready for it?

Ivan – This is a very pertinent question. There have indeed been high expectations of overly sophisticated forms of service and device convergence and claims that it’s going to happen. But sometimes it takes a while until it comes together.

The most promising news is, in fact, a shift in end-user behaviour. Most end users have and use multiple media devices. It’s probably digital music that led everyone to take for granted that media assets follow them from one device and location to the next. The result of this is that everyone wants a piece of it – even non-technologically savvy consumers are developing a ‘digital lifestyle’.

So, thanks to the combination of multiple and nearly ubiquitous delivery networks (satellite, terrestrial, cable, DSL, mobile, etc) and an increasing diversity in media consumption devices (TV, PC, mobile, portable players, net books, etc) there’s now a real opportunity for a more integrated experience.

But how relevant is this to digital TV? Is there a business rationale?

Ivan – We believe it’s completely relevant. This emerging ‘digital lifestyle’ inevitably accelerates or even disrupts traditional digital TV (DTV) business models, and pay TV in particular. The main driver for this is internet TV, also known as ‘over-the-top (OTT) content delivery’. An increasing number of consumers are already acquiring OTT content on devices such as PCs and game consoles. If you want to bring this content to the TV or extend TV content to other devices you risk removing the last barrier between what were up to now two pretty distinct worlds.

Let’s also not forget that DTV is only one source of digital entertainment content. To ensure it remains relevant in the long term, DTV business models will need to adapt to the consumer’s increasingly complex pattern of how they consume digital content (watch, pause, rewind, record/save, annotate, share, comment, discuss with friends, search, etc).

So operators and content providers will initially be somewhat defensive, even though ignoring this trend will only exacerbate the threat from pure OTT even in the short term. Instead they should address the entire ‘content lifecycle’ to extend content usage rights and open up consumption methods. This can also lead to an increased ARPU (average revenue per user) for all stakeholders.

What technical hurdles remain? Has all of the above already been properly addressed with industry standards?

Philippe – We need to remember that the ultimate aim of ‘home networking’ is to provide multi-device and multi-location media consumption of both large and small screen entertainment for a seamless entertainment experience. The general expectation is that people will be able to just plug a consumer electronic (CE) device into their home entertainment network to access content anywhere, at any time. Faced with this, the industry still has a long way to go. There’s unlikely to be a magical solution to make it all happen at once.

Standards might help and are, in fact, the only workable solution in the long run – but so far we’ve seen more divergence than convergence of these. There are simply too many existing standard ecosystems which defy the whole purpose of creating a standard.

On the other hand, we’re convinced that there’s an immediate opportunity for the digital TV industry. It needs to structure the offer step by step to successfully monetise the trend and create a profitable service. Pragmatic executable steps and simple, concrete user cases are what’s required for operators to benefit from this trend.

Do simple, concrete user cases for something that sounds so complicated actually exist?

Philippe – Yes, absolutely. We’ve been drawing up a lot of down-to-earth user cases revolving around scenarios that are now well understood by consumers – such as xVOD, catch-up and PVR (personal video recorders). We then also take the home networking angle and the different devices that are already present (multiple PCs, game consoles, media players, network storage, etc) into account. Addressing these kinds of scenarios still has many technical ramifications though, such as separating play-out from content management – and, from the storage point, adapting the format to accommodate the different device characteristics and even different content protection technologies that will need to coexist in the home.

So, what does a DTV operator need to do to make these scenarios work?

Philippe – Content propagation is typically associated with the client-centric model where content travels to other devices from the device originally used to acquire the content. This client-centric view is, however, only one approach. More recently, a cloud-centric view has started to emerge. In this case, content is delivered from the cloud to different devices in the relevant format. We believe both models can coexist.

In both scenarios the guiding principle is that the operator should rely on components already available today while remaining immune to all the mushrooming standard ecosystems for content protection.

Thus we see two key pillars:

• 1. An over-arching services head-end that’s network/device independent
• 2. A flexible fan-out point at the client side.

We think the service head-end should be conceived around a Federated Services Architecture, that is, one single over-arching layer that converges the entire service definition, asset management, service delivery and content protection workflow. This can accommodate both cloud-centric and client-centric models. In the cloud-centric model the asset management in the services head-end is used to federate across multiple devices and their delivery networks, media formats and content protection schemes. In the client-centric model, however, the asset management will primarily define the propagation rules that the conditional access solution (CAS) will allow in handover mode towards in-home content protection solutions.

To enable this handover point of content rights for the client we’ve defined a persistent rights management (PRM) concept to serve multiple purposes. It manages secure storage of DVR (digital video recorded) content, even on external storage. It also allows multi-room DVR and viewing across STBs (set-top boxes) or PCs. And lastly, it offers a flexible fan-out point towards different in-home content protection systems (with Digital Living Network Alliance probably being the most practically useable at this point).

Ivan – We really believe this is important as it gives the operator not only the much needed interoperability with a level playing field of CE devices, but also independence from all the different standard frameworks. It also implements a clean separation of concern between CAS (delivering content rights to the home) and content protection (managing the propagation of content in a way that honours the content rights).

The interesting point here is that most of our customers already have PRM deployed for their PVR service. This means that the PVR has existing dormant capabilities that can be easily activated to underpin these more sophisticated scenarios that, in fact, logically extend the PVR behaviour.

So it looks like we should watch this space. What can we expect on this front next from Nagravision?

Ivan – The key components are there to make this work and we’ll have some of these on display at CES in Las Vegas in January. The next challenge will revolve around the user experience (UeX) to ensure that all scenarios are easy to achieve from all the different screens we’re already including in the next generation of our NAGRA Media GUIDE. As you say – watch this space!