The SCTE and the ECCA Meeting, 2004

ECCA - The European Cable Communications Association ECCA is the trade association for European cable operators. It holds an annual meeting, in a different European city each year, which is a combination of AGM, conference, exhibition and social gathering. SCTE President, Dr. Roger Blakeway, attended the 2004 congress. Here's his report.

ECCA President, Bernard Cottin	President's Address This year represented the 50^th annual meeting of the European Cable Communications Association (ECCA). With new members Numéricâble, Noos and the Slovenian and Bulgarian Cable Associations, ECCA now has 35 members and this year the annual congress bandwagon rolled into Barcelona at the end of March. Over 350 delegates attended the three day event which includes a General Assembly and AGM for members and an open conference and exhibition. After one year as President, John Riorden stepped down to be replaced by Bernard Cottin, CEO of Numéricâble with Dr Manuel Cubero of Kabel Deutschland as Vice President. In a bullish message, Cottin stated that: "The European cable industry is becoming a strong reality, participating to the building of the European Information Society. ECCA will continue to support the implementation of a fair regulatory environment encouraging competition between infrastructures, a condition for the development of broadband services in Europe. We also intend to develop cooperation between ECCA in new fields like technical standardisation and marketing practices."

Affordable Digital TV Having spent some years eulogising the future of MHP, ECCA has now decided to concentrate on a more pragmatic approach and announced that it is finalising a technical baseline specification for an affordable basic set-top box for massive deployment of digital TV services. It is intended to provide guidance to manufacturers to produce interoperable devices that can be deployed in European countries, by listing a comprehensive set of technical requirements applicable to one-way as well as two-way cable networks. It is hoped that it will also pave the way for establishing a platform that more sophisticated features such as return channel capabilities or support of complex applications can be built upon. Dr. Manuel Cubero stated that: "The development of the ECCA set-top box specification is a great initiative as it facilitates a fast transition from analogue to digital, one of the key items on our agenda. It is essential for the speedy development of digital TV via cable to have low-priced, cable-ready, interoperable IRDs commercially available very soon." A workshop aimed at the manufacturing industry, whose support and involvement is vital, is planned in Brussels on 26 April 2004. The draft specification will be provided in advance to silicon manufacturers, cable vendors as well as consumer equipment manufacturers and the European trade association EICTA.

	Welcome Reception. The opening night of the Congress was market by a civic reception at the Palau de la Generalitat in the Placa Sant Jaume, where we were welcomed by representatives of the City of Barcelona. A remarkable number of familiar faces were present and it proved to be a great networking opportunity.

First CEO Panel - Broadband Internet Next Morning, the open session of the Congress should have started with a keynotes from Ana Palacio, Spain's foreign minister and Erika Mann MEP. However, the events in Madrid the previous week and the subsequent fall of the government meant that the session was cancelled. Perhaps just as well since there was hardly time to fit in the rest of the planned morning sessions. The first CEO panel session was on the future of broadband internet. Although acknowledging the major threat of ADSL, on the whole the panellists were bullish about cable. Richard Alden, CEO of Ono, said that despite offering telephony services (600k residential lines) they had concentrated on broadband delivered internet and reported an almost linear growth since 2002 to point where 32% of customers took broadband services and 70% of all new customers were broadband users. Ono now had 40% of the overall broadband market in nine leading Spanish provinces. Television subscribers numbered 400,000 with about 25% being digital. UPC president Gene Musselman expressed some concern however over bandwidth abuse, with peer-to-peer activity leading to network congestion. His approach was to only allow his basic tier users a maximum of 250Mbytes/month after that they would be throttled back to 64kbits.sec for the rest of that month. He reported UPC would also soon trial a 10mbps service in The Netherlands and Sweden using ETTH (the Teleste/Tratec approach as reported in the current CTE and available as a presentation from the Spring Lecture meeting).

	Second CEO Panel The second CEO panel tackled the place of Cable in the future of television. This, in main, turned to be a discussion of whether ADSL would be a significant factor and whether digital TV would grow fast enough to make services viable. Bernard Cottin, CEO of Numéricâble (which is merging with France Télécom Cable to form a 1.6M subscriber group), told delegates that ADSL delivered TV, launched in France last autumn, and its tie-up with satellite pay-TV presented a real threat to cable. However, there were signs of teething problems that could retard the progress of the DSL services; fewer channels at a higher price point still left cable with an edge although the window was closing.

Financial Panel The morning session ended with a financial panel, looking at future investment in cable. Dick Callahan of Cable Partners Europe pursued his normal line of blaming regulators and incumbent telcos for the poor performance of cable, especially in France and Germany. He also had criticism for MSOs failing to assemble the correct Marketing, Sales, Brand and Product management with 'Integrated Play' being the new buzz word. Hughes Lepic, of Goldman Sachs noted that private equity transactions in the US and in Europe last year were into double figures. He emphasised that investors were now looking for much shorter returns on their investments, 12-18 months as a guideline and strategy more focused on the customer rather than technology. The other essential was that acquisitions should be at realistic prices, something that was obviously not the case in recent years. This was echoed by the other speakers, Mark Mullen of Daniels & Associates and Javier Abad of Apax Partners; US valuations now stood at 10.2 times Ebitda and European at 7.4 times Ebitda, rather than the 20 to 40 multiple in 1999 and 2000.

	Afternoon Sessions Following a tedious regulatory panel, only enlightened by Matthias Kurth, president of the German REG TP, who told the MSOs to stop whingeing about the level 4 problems, the congress moved on to more technical matters. In a session entitled 'Content over Internet and New Forms of Television' the theme mainly the threat from ADSL. Didier Lombard, of France Télécom, perhaps epitomised the ADSL/encumbent situation by announcing that they were investing €700M in ADSL between 2003 and 2005 together with €3B in upgrading their fixed line network to give a broadband reach of 95% of the population. They launched MaLigne TV in Paris in March, following an initial rollout in Lyon, offering a subscription TV service and voucher based VOD. Noel Leslie, ex C&W and now with Chellomedia, had a view on the need for added value interactive services but with cost effective production. They had developed a product suite, called Chello Mistral, to enable a 'create once, publish everywhere' capability, addressing problems of multiple middleware and being platform agnostic. The system also provides for real-time capture and processing of viewer responses with insertion of data back into the broadcast.

2nd Evening The second night saw us all being transported half an hour out of town to the Penedes wine area (or Cava country). In the town of Sant Sadurni d'Anoia we arrived at Cava Cordorniu for the Gala Dinner. Cava Cordoniu has the largest underground cellars in the world; 30km of man-made caves on five levels containing around 100 million bottles of Cava. We were treated to a 'white knuckle' tour of the cellars on a small electric train before getting down to the serious business of eating and sampling the Cava.

John Rees, ntl	1st Technical Workshop The Technical Workshop on the second day returned to the problem of Peer to Peer and other non-asymmetric traffic. Chris Lammers, COO of Cablelabs offered some hope with DOCSIS enhancements providing higher order modulation, wider channels and better handling of symmetrical traffic through channel aggregation. Eduado Belda of ONO offered a Spanish view that pirate movie download was more of a problem than peer-to-peer exchange. Enso Signore from CISCO raised a wry smile when he commented that they had discovered that the required contention ratio changes as you move from short data through MP3 to video and the traditional telco based calculations were somewhat questionable. There seemed general agreement that higher data rates would be needed in the future and Jelle Cnossen of Essente Kablecom predicted 10Mbits symmetrical within 5 years to support new services and compete with ADSL offerings. They were looking at the Tratec/Teleste ETTH solution and commented that with a baseband final drop, the upstream noise essentially started at the final amplifier and it was possible to use 64 or even 256 QAM upstream. John Rees from ntl had similar views on the ever increasing need for bandwidth with the current DOCSIS solution running out of steam at 3Mbits downstream/1Mbit upstream at 50% penetration and a 6:1 contention ration. ETTH and FTTH 100Mbit PONs were possible solutions but both had significant retrofit costs and posed problems of whether you also migrated broadcast TV and Telephony. His view was that FTTH had enormous cost implications at this time but trials of ETTH were envisaged soon.

2nd Technical Workshop The second Technical Workshop looked at the problems surrounding TV over IP. Sudhir Ispahani, CTO of UGC, concentrated on need to develop suitable conditional access (CA) solutions for VOD services since content providers needed to feel comfortable that their assets would be protected. Oran Cassem, CTO of Tanberg Television, having announced that it was they that invented VOD over IP, gave some analysis for VOD in the US. 34% of analogue subscribers migrating to digital wanted VOD and there was 40% less churn in VOD enabled areas. More significantly the drift towards satellite was halted.

Stuart Savage, ntl	Closing Speeches The final two speakers concentrated on the standards issues. Ken McCann (ex ntl and now with Zetacast) dealt with the multiple delivery issue and specifically the development of a Portable Content Format (PCF), which is being put forward by DVB. A technical specification is expected from DVB by the end of the first quarter 2005. Stuart Savage, Chief Engineer of nlt Home, also expounded on the work being done by DVB: early work on In-home Networks had identified the need for "Service Discovery and Selection" (SD&S). A DVB -IPI Phase 1 handbook has already been published and was recommended as a good read. The work has now moved into the DVB IPTV group, which is currently defining the commercial requirements for the second phase. This will provide for Broadcast, artefact-free, quality over both DSL and HFC and address the problems of variable channel lists (MSO or customer defined).

Overall Impression At the end of any exhibition/seminar/congress I always look back and ask the question 'was it worth attending?' Most of the information gleaned could have been sourced from elsewhere but, undoubtedly, a concentrated two day event saves time and effort helps keep the whole thing in focus. The networking opportunities are probably the best available with the European cable community and sunny Barcelona certainly beats a cold and wet Welsh Valley. The ECCA Congress gets my vote!

	ECCA 2003 The ECCA 2003 report is still available.


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