Switched Digital Video's magic number

by Ben Drawbaugh posted Oct 4th 2007 at 12:21PM

The biggest challenge content providers face today is bandwidth. Their customers are demanding more HD, but their network is tapped out. There's no silver bullet, but there are multiple small solutions that all add up. SDV or Switched Digital Video, is one of those and promises to free up to 50% of the utilized bandwidth by only sending the channels that're being watched rather than all the channels, all the time. Unfortunately there's a catch, not only is SDV currently incompatible with 3rd party CableCARD hosts, but to really see the benefits, cable has to reduce the number of subscribers per node. Current service groups are around 1000, but to really take advantage of SDV, the ratio between channels and subscribers needs to be closer to 1:1; so they'd have to deploy four times as many nodes to get there. Currently providers are just doing trials with SDV, but we can expect to see it widespread in 2008. Lets just hope they get that Tuning Resolver thingy ready by then.

Filed under: Industry, Cable

Tags: bandwidth, Cable, CableCARD, SDV, Tuning Resolver, TuningResolver

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

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Jeff N. @ Oct 4th 2007 1:28PM

Any idea Ben, which cable companies will be the first to actually implement SDV.

Neutral

Jake @ Oct 4th 2007 1:57PM

Cox Communications in Northern Virginia already has.

Neutral

Jeff N. @ Oct 4th 2007 4:21PM

Jake & Yankees368, how would you say the performance is so far? Any long delays in retrieving channels? Picture quality , ect?

Neutral

Yankees368 @ Oct 4th 2007 3:04PM

Cablevision already has

Neutral

usiel @ Oct 4th 2007 4:54PM

I'm on cox in NOVA and haven't noticed too much difference except for when using just a standard converter box on a non-HDTV and there seems to be some lag time using the Guide and flipping up the channels. The HD DVR converter though I haven't noticed any difference.

Neutral

Jake @ Oct 5th 2007 8:43AM

Cox Nova is planning to switch a bunch of channels to SDV, but the only channel that is actually switched at the moment is NFL-HD. The rest will switch later this month.

The channels that are going to SDV are:

All Pay-per-View channels
All Paquete Latino channels
CMT Pure Country
NASA
Jewelry TV
Cable Market Place II
American Life TV
Ovation
Cspan3
BET JAZZ
SBTN
Bridges TV
ART
Zee TV
TV Asia
TFC (The Filipino Channel)
All new digital channels
All new HD channels

Neutral

Matt @ Oct 4th 2007 5:36PM

While Fios technically isn't cable, isn't it using a switched service?

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Ben @ Oct 4th 2007 6:50PM

Nope, not at all. It works just like traditional cable adn they don't use SDV.

Neutral

roger_huston @ Oct 4th 2007 9:08PM

All,

If anyone is waiting for the day where either the phone company or cable company is going to go around and replace all the hard cables in the ground, keep on dreaming.

Sure there has been lots of smaller deployments and even quite a bit of backbone work, but "fiber to the home" has always been a pipe dream. Oh, and while people want to do this, they can't. Every city, every county has different rules and requirements that have bogged down providers for years.

The future will be a wireless one for most. Even today, with Sat. TV, cell phone and 3G wireless you can do pretty good for yourself. Things like Switched Video are only stop-gaps to help people compete, but in the end, the world is going wireless and all those cables in the ground are already obsolete.

- Roger

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