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FREEZE FRAME

As has been said in this column earlier, entertainment in the digital age is going through a dramatic change and one of the clear signs of the times to come is the rapid spread of I-Pods (and similar devices) and the digital downloading of music.

Television has, on the other hand, not seen any remarkable change . In the US and parts of Europe now, things are beginning to happen. Conventional TV viewing is being replaced by new configurations.

Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) are ushering in an era of time shifted TV and ad-free programming. In Korea and few pockets of Europe, true broadband is enabling similar viewing through streamed content.

The much-celebrated Moore's Law has ensured that more power is packed on the ubiquitous silicon chip at lower cost.

Higher bandwidth together with better connectivity are creating an eco-system where multiple devices are accessing multiple carriage systems for multiple content streams.

So we are beginning to see what till a few years ago was mere fantasy. Since the early 1990s, technologists and visionary business leaders from pioneering companies in the content, computer, consumer electronic, television broadcasting and cable TV businesses have been working to change the way we watch and interact with our television sets.

They have been working towards an 'everything-on-demand' future. However, as many cable and broadband service providers are discovering, especially in the more developed markets, the true revenue driver is video-on-demand, especially movies and high profile events.

Next-generation networks are finally taking shape around the world. As Jeff Baumgartner, the technology writer, says: "One doesn't wage a war of innovation without weighing all of the of the strategies and tactics available."

This war to grab eyeballs is even more exciting as the forces range from the neighbourhood cable operator to the telecom provider, from the Direct-to-Home (DTH) operator to the satellite broadcaster.

Converged networks are appearing fast. In Italy, Fastweb, an Ethernet-based service provider, has three million subscribers and the highest revenue per user.

In Singapore and Berlin, fully digital cable systems are being installed in the new IP-dominated digital universe. Several initiatives are underway in India too.

High-speed access from the home through DSL (and its variants), Metro Ethernet, fibre (to the home or curb), digital cable, DTH and even the initial trials of digital terrestrial television by Doordarshan are just some of the options.

Next is the construction of secure video delivery networks that bring rich content to large numbers of subscribers.

Delivering high-value content to large numbers of users requires tremendous upfront capital as well as ongoing operational costs for bandwidth usage, system management, monitoring and so on.

According to some estimates, in the next five years Rs 20000 crore will be invested in building next-generation video (converged) delivery systems in India.

Providing streaming high-value content at the quality expected by end users and content providers is a challenging task. Such content is typically encoded and compressed between 3 and 8 Mbps using MPEG-2 compression.

If less quality can be tolerated, VHS-quality content can be encoded using MPEG-4 compression at 750 Kbps to 1 Mbps. At 3 Mbps, a single gigabit Ethernet interface can deliver anywhere from 200 to 250 streams, depending on the server and software implementation. As we move towards wireless broadband, this becomes even more complex.

Imagine scaling such a system to hundreds of thousands or millions of users. The approach in the past has been to use specialised hardware, to solve I/O intensive problems.

This approach not only meant substantial upfront capital expenditures but also led to fast obsolescence. Another approach was to use custom or black box appliances "� these were non-standard computer devices that were built for one purpose and also led to fast obsolescence.

Today most manufacturers are gravitating towards uniform standards like MPEG 4(7..)and VC 1(WM9) for encoding. Middleware, which sits on most devices, is becoming interoperable.

The debate whether the on-demand revolution is going to PC led or TV led is fast becoming redundant. The same content may be streamed through different platforms to different segments of users at different times.

One-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many (unicast, broadcast and multicast) are all going to exist together.

With the advances and mass-market availability of computing, networking, and storage technologies, it makes no sense to use proprietary computers or set-top boxes to solve these problems.

When you can use off-the-shelf components to realise high performance and scalability, you can take advantage of Moore's Law, leading to continued decreases in capital spending and consequent consumer cost.

India has a unique advantage as we have far less investment in legacy networks. Having said that, the time has come to move forward on all fronts if we want to be a part of the digital world.

The government must come out with legislation that is technology agnostic. The stakeholders must forge new alliances. The creative professionals must innovate.

The consumer is waiting and watching to see who will get how much share of her attention and wallet.

(Amit Khanna is chairman of Reliance Entertainment. The views expressed here are his own)