The Evolution of the Innovative Video Industry

When you think of cable, the words “innovation” and “forefront” may not come to mind, but cable historically made incredibly innovative growth. Cable expanded its footprint throughout the United States, bringing more and more channels to consumers with higher and higher quality.

Joseph Weber, vice president, technology strategy at TiVo Inc. discussed the evolution of the video industry yesterday at ITEXPO (News - Alert) Austin 2012 in a Video World Insider Conference & Expo Session.

Many years ago, satellite distribution and hybrid fiber coax were major growths among the cable industry. Between 1996 and 2002, there was approximately $65 billion invested in order to build higher capacity hybrid networks as well as fiber optic and coaxil cable. This created clearer reception, more channels, along with industry trends including footprint expansion and channel expansion.

With the later introduction of digitalization, MPEG-2 introduced binary, not analog signal loss, better video quality, and systems/Metadata. QAM provided Bandwidth rivaling fiber and 10 times the number of standard definition channels per MHz. It also introduced out of band communication which included control as and two-way that led to DOCSIS. Additionally, the MPEG-2 system allowed for transmission of a channel grid guide. These days, this next generation channel guide provides intelligent search to allow users to search by actor, title or keyword. It also provides the ability to go backwards in time, recommend similar shows, social integration, and a list of content from the Web.

On its onset, TiVo (News - Alert) was introduced as an extremely innovative service and has since continued evolving within the cable industry. This has led to the concept that what you watch is being influenced by social networks and what is currently popular.

“Historically in the early days of TiVo, we wanted to make sure what you watched Was private and secure as possible, but today many of people that use the social integration feature of the TiVo iPad application elect to allow their friends to know what they are watching,” said Weber.

Launched in 1999, TiVo was a critical innovation that was a huge shift in the cable industry, a DVR technology that allows you to pause live TV, skip commercials and shows you don’t want to watch. Today, TiVo’s whole home DVR solution has become a gateway between the video services and all devices in the home.

What lead to this DVR revolution? There were improvements in MPEG compression along with dramatically increasing hard drive storage costs, which has allowed TiVo to provide interactivity, a huge trend that entails two-way TV services.

Soon, Video On Demand (VOD) came into the picture. Cable subscribers viewed 3.6 billion of hours of VOD in 2010, which was only 2.4 percent of all programming consumed by about 50 million VOD-capable homes in the U.S. Now, TV advertising is growing into on-demand and online video advertising.

With these series of innovations, TV is now everywhere with the proliferation of consumer devices that can render digital video everywhere they are on their mobile devices. Because of TV everywhere and the Internet, there is more content out there, so technology is adapting quickly to make it easier to get more content widely available on multi-screens in multi-locations.

Want to learn more about how video is helping to transform the industry? Don’t miss Video World Conference & Expo, collocated with ITEXPO Austin 2012 happening now in Austin, TX.  Stay in touch with everything happening at Video World Conference & Expo. Follow us on Twitter.