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Solutions » Telcos Introduction Telco television providers have the advantage over their cable, satellite, and terrestrial competitors of an intrinsically stream-based, two-way digital infrastructure. TV over DSL and TV over fiber are already leveraging the developments and economies of scale of modern data networking, as well as the latest improvements in video encoding and compression. The telco industry is already in the process of extensive expenditures in last-mile transport and backhaul equipment in order to support the bandwidth demands of video, so it is imperative that the addition of advanced services incurs minimal incremental cost. The RetroVue™ System encompasses a suite of crucial components, comprising a high ingestion rate video server, an ASI-to-Gigabit Ethernet IP streamer, and a controller/set-top application server. How does RetroVue work? GoBackTV’s suite of products supports the RetroVue service by enabling compact, affordable narrowcast video. The RetroVue service works by delivering to each viewer his own, personal television channel, which means that he gets to watch what he wants, not what everyone else is watching. Besides jumping back to the start of the program, the viewer can jump forward, jump backward, pause, and return to the normal video broadcast. Also, by using the MyRetroVue™ interface on his set top, computer, or PDA, the subscriber can create playlists, manage channel bundles, specify advertising preferences, and access other time-shifted, on-demand applications, such as network PVR (nPVR), Video on Demand (VoD), and Television on Demand (ToD). In addition, the operator can use the two-way interaction to enforce and augment DRM and Conditional Access policies. Enabling technology GoBackTV’s vision reflects the new digital headend, in which video, voice, and data services coalesce into a single digital system. RetroVue delivers the video portion of this all-digital triple play. Individual components interconnect through standardized Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), and can be deployed to fit any service operator’s network topology—centralized, distributed, redundant, or mixed. RetroVue system elements can interoperate with legacy and third-party equipment. They can also perform as standalone products.
Figure 1 RetroVue System Diagram (Distributed Architecture) Figure 1 illustrates the RetroVue system. GoBackTV-supplied elements include:
StreamCache high-ingestion-rate video server. StreamCache is a 2RU server which currently provides up to 1700 hours of real-time storage at 3.8Mbps, and sufficient disk throughput to ingest 100 simultaneous digital channels and serve 480 independent, non-blocking 3.8Mbps video streams. I/O and management ports are Gigabit Ethernet. RetroVue Application Server. The RetroVue Application Server is the heart of the RetroVue System, and coordinates RetroVue System components to deliver a complete spectrum of stream-based video services, including Video on Demand (VoD), network PVR (nPVR), time-shifted television, Start Over and Look Back, historical EPG, user-based profiles, and personalTV services. It manages and controls the entire RetroVue system, including service creation, subscriber management, dynamic scheduling of video streams and storage resources, system monitoring and data collection, and GUI-based element management and configuration. The platform also provides host support for MyRV Portal HTML-based middleware, which enables television service providers to deliver customized navigation and information services to subscribers’ set-top boxes using a standard HTML browser interface. By leveraging industry standards, client GUI layout and appearance are simple to customize or update, and can even be done in-house using standard design tools. DVB-SIfter. The SIfter is used to probe the DVB System Information (SI) tables embedded within DVB-S transmissions and extract Electronic Program Guide (EPG) information for the RetroVue Application Server databases. With this information, the RetroVue Application Server creates a historical EPG to help viewers locate and navigate time-shifted content. The input port for the SIfter is Gigabit Ethernet. ASI-to-Gigabit Ethernet IP Streamer. The AG4404 converts up to 4 ASI’s worth of MPEG-2 transport streams into a Gigabit Ethernet stream in order to bridge the gap between legacy interfaces and RetroVue components. The output stream can be unicast or multicast IP or native Ethernet. Input Multi-Program Transport Streams (MPTSs) may be transmitted in “pass-through” mode or may be demultiplexed into individual Single Program Transport Streams (SPTSs) for simpler remultiplexing or for transmission to separate destinations. In addition, the ASI-GbE IP Streamer can perform the same function as the SIfter, and provide DVB-SI-based EPG information to the RetroVue Application Server. How to get started with RetroVue?RetroVue System components can be deployed as standalone elements to deliver just the functionality you need, when you need it. For example, StreamCache could be deployed alone as a low-cost video cache to supplement an existing VOD deployment. Then, as the network delivery capacity is built out, it could be repurposed for stream-based services such as time-shifting and nPVR by adding centralized and distributed StreamCaches and RetroVue Application Servers. As the demand for personal streams increases, the RetroVue System can be incrementally expanded. A quarter of a rack (11RU) of RetroVue head end components can service 2000 independent 3.8Mbps video streams, including real-time ingestion of 100 channels of digital video, play-out of over 2000 independent non-blocking streams, buffering of thousands of hours of content, and stream processing, all at a fraction of today’s VoD per-stream costs. How does RetroVue fit in the network?
Figure 2 RetroVue connections in the network
Digital video sources with traditional ASI interfaces, such as IRD/IRTs, encoders, and video groomers can feed into an ASI-to-GbE converter for protocol conversion to Gigabit Ethernet. The newest generation of video sources now includes Gigabit Ethernet output options as well. StreamCache can intercept video streams carried on Gigabit Ethernet to provide storage and play-out for on-demand services, or can be bypassed by legacy VoD and non-stored video. Elements can be deployed centrally or distributed in the network. GoBackTV equipment can accept native Gigabit Ethernet input, or IP/UDP-encapsulated Gigabit Ethernet, with either multicast or unicast addressing. Content may be pre-encrypted by Conditional Access systems, or it may be encrypted by on the fly by an external bulk encryptor. Although diagrams in this document show all components, each RetroVue product may be used independently from the others. Conclusion The RetroVue System gives telco television providers the tools to launch their services with a distinct competitive differentiation, while also saving on operational costs and complexities, and building in a significant level of future-proofing.Downloads |
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