Business need

VOD is not only a driver of business growth—it also has become an effective tool for preventing encroachment by satellite providers. As VOD services expand to “everything on demand”, VOD becomes an even more important revenue stream for those operators capable of providing subscribers with access to diverse libraries of compelling content.

Challenges

If you can deliver rich content with excellent service levels and absolute reliability whenever your customers want it, they will become increasingly reliant not only on your VOD offerings but on all of your services. However, this requires the ability to ensure video quality even as tens-of-thousands of video streams are transported from the headend to the d-hubs. And since your VOD revenues are directly related to the amount of desirable content available, an economic means for providing access to vast libraries of movies and television programming is a necessity.

Solution

Building a low-cost, high-quality VOD offering requires an efficient and specialized VOD switching and transport solution that minimizes the use of fiber assets and enables switching of content from any server at the headend to any service group QAM resource, and in the future to any CMTS, at any d-hub.

Ciena's offerings

You can deploy Ciena managed Optical Ethernet switches or multiplexers in the d-hub and take advantage of the most stringent Quality of Service capabilities in the industry. If all Ethernet switching is centralized in the headend to minimize complexity, then our Layer 1 VirtualWire multiplexing of 8-9 GbE channels onto a 10 Gigabit DWDM wavelength assures that VOD has its own dedicated transport bandwidth to the d-hub. For even greater flexibility and efficiency, our Ethernet Services Provisioning Switch may also be deployed at the d-hub. In this case, VOD traffic is combined at Layer 2 with HSD and VoIP traffic, but zero packet loss and deterministic, low latency and jitter are still guaranteed. Both approaches benefit from 99.999% availability, SONET-like fault isolation and sub-50 millisecond protection switching to ensure that VOD services are always available.

Benefits

• Embed your services into subscriber homes by allowing them to watch virtually whatever they want, whenever they want
• Gain a competitive advantage over satellite providers and use on-demand to build subscriber loyalties and create cross-selling opportunities
• Provide the reliability and protection needed for high-bandwidth, on-demand services
• Reduce the number of network elements to minimize CAPEX and simplify management and drive down ongoing operational costs
• Deliver cost-effective access to centralized library archives at the Super Headend to cost-effectively increase service utilization and network value