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Diing Yu Chen, director, marketing–broadband and rich media
services (network and service providers business), Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific,
is responsible for the promotion and creation of next generation solutions
supporting the new generation networks that telecom service providers are
building. These exciting new networks promise to change the way services are
delivered and depend heavily on the technologies, products and service that HP
provides.
What is your assessment of the media and broadband services segment?
The broadband and rich media is a young and developing industry. However, it
is becoming increasingly important to both the consumer and those who are
supplying the products to this industry. There has been talk of convergence of
content and media and communications for years, but it has not yet taken off.
From our observations and discussion with the customers, we see that we are at
the threshold of the take off. We see 2003 as the watershed year for the concept
to really go off.
The are four main factors driving this. First, now there is a standard to
rally on for broadband and rich media services. For example, when it comes to
content, the MPEG format is taking center stage. The second standard that is
emerging and getting widely accepted is IP coming to the transport layer.
Third, content providers are getting used to the idea that they cannot have
different distribution channels for sending the content. Fourth, appliance
prices are coming down. A couple of years back the IP set-top box for streaming
video on TV was about $1,000, but today it is about $200.
What is HP’s role in these services?
Some service providers are already providing the rich media kind of
services, and we are already working with some of them. For example, Swisscom
provides video-on-demand services and live event coverage through IP. In Asia,
SingTel, and PCCW are offering these kind of services. And HP is trying to build
an ecosystem here, by working with all the parties and tying them to a purpose.
Right now we are busy on the consumer angle. We are working on how to have
the right kind of appliances, set-top boxes, etc. at right prices. In India,
people are still talking about the broadband services and the concept is still
new.
What should be the broadband strategy for these kind of services?
The problem of the broadband is usually the last mile. I would say that DSL
is the technology invented for the West because people live far from each other.
So you put DSLAMs and wire up to the offices. In Asia, the density is very high
so we need to look at solutions that can be applicable to that kind of
demographics. For instance, in China people are looking at wiring the building,
i.e., Ethernet to the building. And it works better than DSL. In other places,
you can use satellite. So there are many strategies that can be employed.
What are the specific things that HP does in the broadband space?
We divide this space into three main areas–content, the core aspects of
streaming, and the content distribution network. For content, we create an
environment for broadcasters, the content creators, and the content providers to
mange the content from conceptualisation, to creation, archival and
distribution. The second area includes hosting the content, effectively
streaming the content across demographies and technologies, and looking at
integrating all these things with the back-end support area like billing,
content management, and subscriber management. Content distribution takes care
of the inefficiencies through duplication in the fat pipes and so the focus is
on maximizing the infrastructure through caching or traffic management.