The Big Push: HD Competition Heats Up

Competition on the high-definition TV front continues to heat up as more HD-capable televisions make their way into consumers’ homes.

“We’re seeing a tremendous growth in HD sets,” Starz Entertainment President and COO Bill Myers said during his keynote speech at October’s TelcoTV event in Atlanta, adding that in 2007, more HDTVs were sold than were standard-definition sets. (See chart below for more HD data.)

HDTV Household Estimates for the United States

As a result, DIRECTV aggressively has been promoting the fact that it offered 70 HD channels last year, and 100 HD channels as of this month.

Comcast Corp., which currently claims to offer 200 HD channels, expects to double its HD channels this year.

Verizon Communications Inc. disclosed in November plans to expand its HD lineup on its FiOS FTTH network fivefold, to 150 channels of HD, starting this coming spring. It also plans to add more HD video-on-demand content.

Telco TV pioneer SureWest Communications Inc., which launched HD in December 2005 over its 100mbps FTTH network, enhanced its HD lineup in 2007, making available 38 HD channels as of November.

And Peter Hill, vice president of video and converged services to AT&T Labs, commented during his TelcoTV keynote that the telco (whose U-verse services run over a hybrid fiber/DSL network) plans to up its HD channels from the current 30 to an unspecified number at some point, adding that the reduction in bandwidth needed to support HD is going faster than expected.

“For telcos, it’s really a capacity issue,” says Myers of Starz, when asked how a telco like AT&T can capture customers from the cablecos and DBS providers when it only offers 30 HD channels. “I’m sure it’s something they’re trying to deal with.

“Do you need all the [HD] channels out there?” continues Myers. “For the telcos, I think that would be nice. But most important is that you have the right content.”

While the cablecos and DBS providers have the advantage of being established players in the TV arena, including HD, telcos have the benefit of using the latest video-coding technology out of the gate. Today, telco TV is based on a technology called MPEG-4 Part 10, also known as AVC (for advanced video coding), out of ITU-T and ISO/IEC 14496-10. It’s an advance on the earlier MPEG-2, largely used by cablecos and DBS providers because it can deliver the same quality HD picture at just half the bit rate, says Matthew Goldman, vice president of technology compression systems at TANDBERG Television Inc., part of the Ericsson Group. Full-resolution HD using MPEG-2 is in the 16-19mbps range, whereas MPEG-4 is identified within the 6-10mbps range. Goldman added that an MPEG-4 ASP/Part 2 option preceded MPEG-4 Part 10, but that the former only offered a 20 percent gain versus MPEG-2, so it was never widely deployed.

AT&T’s U-verse IPTV services use MPEG-4 at 1.5mbps to 2mbps for standard-definition and 6mbps to 7mbps for HD content, says Tony Stanley, director of marketing and business development at Scientific Atlanta, a Cisco Company, which is one of the set-top box suppliers for U-verse. Meanwhile, the cablecos and DBS companies, because they already have large embedded bases of MPEG-2 set-top boxes deployed, still primarily are MPEG-2, with SD at 4mbps and HD in the 14-18mbps range, he says, adding that these companies don’t have a lot of pressure to move to MPEG-4 because they both have plenty of bandwidth to the home.

Of course, even with the benefit of MPEG-4 AVC, equipment suppliers such as Scientific Atlanta continue to work on reducing the bit rates for HD encoding, while at the same time developing set-top box software for robust HD processing, explains David Alsobrook, director of IPTV products at Scientific Atlanta.

However, it should be noted that while MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 allow network operators to deliver HD content at a range of bit rates, some programmers have clear preferences on the bit rates they want used to deliver their content. For example, Scientific Atlanta’s Stanley says ESPN requires its HD programming be delivered between 10mbps and 12mbps for MPEG-4.

While Ervin Leibovici, CEO at BitBand Technologies Inc., believes to deliver HD effectively as a telco, “you gotta have fiber,” he adds that there are some special ways to deliver HD “in a progressive manner to a set-top box” to get around bandwidth limitations and timing issues. At TelcoTV, BitBand introduced such a solution, called progressive download, which allows the subscriber to begin viewing HD content before the entire movie or program reaches the set-top box. In addition to addressing bandwidth barriers, progressive download also enables HD to be delivered to subscribers with set-top boxes without a disk drive to support high-def programming, he adds.

AT&T Inc. www.att.com

BitBand Technologies Inc. www.bitband.com

Comcast Corp. www.comcast.com

DIRECTV www.directv.com

The Nielsen Co. www.nielsen.com

Scientific Atlanta, A Cisco Company www.scientificatlanta.com

Starz Entertainment LLC www.starz.com

SureWest Communications Inc. www.surewest.com

TANDBERG Television Inc. www.tandbergtv.com

Verizon Communications Inc. www.verizon.com

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