The Dutch cable operator Ziggo has been outlining what it believes is the biggest benefit of a cloud UI: the ability to completely update your user interface without having to replace any of the customer premise equipment (CPE) that is already in consumer homes.
In March 2013 Ziggo introduced an on-demand service over its DVB-C (classic cable) network to customers with one-way set-top boxes and late that year it extended the service to CI Plus 1.3 CAM devices, a development that was possible thanks to the use of a cloud-based UI. By processing the UI in the cloud and delivering the catch-up and VOD movie graphics (and navigation) as a video stream over DVB-C, the company can utilize pretty much any CPE that has a video decoder.
This capability is particularly important to Ziggo because the company has allowed customers to buy their own STBs and hook them up to the Ziggo service. This, together with the wide range of television sets that are compatible with the Ziggo CAM modules, means there is a wide diversity of devices in Ziggo homes, many owned by the users. Even an ambitious or expensive device swap-out programme was not practical.
“There was no other option but to go to the cloud, other than replace all the devices people were using,†Eric Meijer, Senior Innovation Manager at Ziggo told Connected TV Summit last month. “So in reality there was no alternative to the cloud.â€
By making the UI device-independent, by abstracting it from the CPE, it is now easier for Ziggo to make further updates to the user experience. “In the past you had to update for each set-top box and test that device and then take it live and that took months. Now you make the changes on a web server and it is done for 300 devices in one go. If something goes wrong you can revert back to the old software version,†Meijer reports.
“In the early days of the new system we made updates to the UI twice a week, although that pace of change has now slowed. It is very possible to manage a high rate of changes without the risk of making mistakes and we can support those changes on lots of different devices, which means the customer can continue to choose whatever device they want.â€
Today Ziggo customers can enjoy the on-demand services on six different set-top boxes and 300 television sets and the total figure will reach 600 devices by the end of 2014 (including all the variations on each key television platform).
As we reported previously, Liberty Global is launching a ‘Horizon in the cloud’ offering in at least one of its markets that will put the UI in the cloud. At least some storage is moving into the cloud, too. At one of its operations, the German cable operator Unitymedia KabelBW, Director of CPE & Product Innovations, Dr Daniel Hesselbarth, believes ‘cloudification’ of TV helps to meet the expectation for increasingly diverse experiences on any device.
He points out that the Horizon platform being deployed across Liberty Global operations is not a set-top box platform but a cloud based television service that includes a gateway/set-top box as clients. “Lots of services like the EPG, recommendation and apps are served from the cloud and extended to devices like tablets,†he says.
Like Ziggo, Liberty Global is using ActiveVideo’s CloudTV solution for cloud UI and the company anticipates similar benefits to the Dutch operator. The first is the decoupling of the user experience from device dependencies so the UI upgrade can be experienced on devices that cannot run it natively or where it is simply easier to deploy without custom device implementations. The second is faster innovation in future. With the UI in the cloud, it is hoped that the use of a single cloud application with server-side rendering will simplify future software releases.
According to Sachin Sathaye, VP, Strategy & Product Marketing at ActiveVideo, “We believe the browser should be in the cloud. The biggest advantage of cloud UI is device independence. Every time Pay TV operators create a new service they have to consider the devices that are already in the market. ‘Will this service work on my 10-year-old set-top box?’ We believe you need to break away from the ‘Device first, Service later’ scenario. It should be ‘Service first, Devices independent’.â€
Sathaye expands on the other big benefit of cloud UI: faster time-to-market. Operators keep asking themselves how they are going to compete with OTT providers while they struggle with long STB development cycles, including what could be a three-year cycle to develop a new UI. “Facebook and Twitter are doing A/B testing every 15 days, which means new services every 15 days,†he told Connected TV Summit. “They need to break the mould and deploy services faster, and they can do that using the cloud.â€
Editor’s note
When talking about a UI it is worth making a distinction between a UI that is served from the cloud and rendered on a device, and a UI that is rendered in the cloud and served on a device. When we (at Videonet) talk about cloud UI we mean the latter. In effect the rendering function has been virtualized and that is why it becomes a cloud UI solution.
The ‘host-on-cloud and render-on-device’ approach is well understood. In multiscreen TV for example, you can have one HTML5 application for each kind of device to access on a cloud server. In this case the application would be slightly optimized for each device, even if much of it can be re-used. Efforts have been made to use common frameworks and code bases to make an application as portable as possible, but that is not the same thing as having one application on a cloud server that renders a UI there for use across all devices.
There are strong supporters of the cloud hosted and locally rendered approach. One of their arguments is that you can exploit the nuances of each device fully. Another is that it is bandwidth-efficient because most of the time the UI hardly changes. So if someone stays on a page or presses a button that makes a slight change to the UI, the already-rendered graphics can be re-used from a local cache. You do not have to keep delivering the same UI information.
The cloud UI is also different to a remote UI (RUI). RUI traditionally refers to a scenario where a Pay TV operator UI is projected from a server device in the home to client devices. The most obvious use-case is whole-home TV, where the DVR acts as the RUI server and the UI is sent to a secondary set-top box or a Smart TV or game console where it is rendered. The purpose of RUI is to enable a Pay TV operator to maintain their full ‘look-and-feel’ when delivering video across a home network using their own lightweight clients or CE clients.
RVU Alliance (RVU-RUI) and DLNA both provide RUI technologies. In an example of how the HTML5 RUI used by DLNA works in a whole-home media distribution scenario, the client device first ‘discovers’ a server (like a DVR in the home) and then uses a URL to retrieve and render the user interface (e.g. the Pay TV programme guide or VOD portal) on the secondary device. In effect, the UI is treated like a website, hosted on a server and displayed on the client.
In January, the RVU Alliance introduced a cloud capability for its RUI. This means a RVU-RUI user interface can be delivered to devices from cloud servers rather than just from in-home servers. This is a notable development, contained in the RVU 2.0 specification, which is backwards compatible on hardware that supports RVU 1.0. As a result, operators could use an RVU-RUI on what was already a growing number of devices but without having an RVU server device inside the home. The RUI client device is still primarily responsible for the rendering in this cloud-hosted RUI scenario.
More reading
Want to know more about what cloud computing and virtualization means for television, and the potential benefits across TV operations including headends and data analysis? Videonet has published two reports about cloud computing and virtualization and like all our content, they are totally free.
Making The Cloud Work For TV, April 2014
Cloud Computing At The Service Of Pay TV, September 2012
