nCube Pushing Everything

Cable World, March 12, 2001 by Brian Santo

Video-on-demand typically means movies-on-demand. It's logical that VOD is often considered the next major service for cable operators to roll out because it's an extension of the familiar, successful pay-per-view service.

"In my opinion, that's the wrong model," says nCube president Michael Pohl. "What we'd like to see is EOD -- everything-on-demand."

Why stop at movies, he argues. "If I want to watch the Australian Open tennis tournament, which is on live at 3 a.m., I might pay a dollar to watch it later when I get home at 8."

No doubt Pohl is sincere about wanting to order the Australian Open, but the statement is also more than a little self-serving. Few companies have the technology ready to make EOD happen -- one exception being nCube.

Several companies are intrigued enough by the notion of EOD to have asked nCube for cost quotes; Pohl would not identify them.

Every VOD system has a finite amount of storage, limiting the number of movies that can be stored, and a finite number of outputs, limiting how many subscribers can be served any particular film at any particular time. The speed of the system is also a factor.

Operators who install VOD systems balance those variables to determine how many different films they want to store and how many copies of each need to be stored, The limits of many VOD systems allow an operator to store and offer only a small handful of films.

nCube, meanwhile, can configure its latest server, the n4, to provide up to 44,000 streams.

The company also employs high-end disk drives for greater amounts of storage, as well as greater reliability.

"Some companies are about to get near us in terms of storage capacity per unit," Pohl says, "but we're about to double what we can do."

Take the ability to output so many streams at high rates (the n4 can scale from 100 mbps to 128 gbps), and add in the massive amount of storage, and nCube makes it possible to store and ship enough content to do EOD. The EOD argument says you also can reap incremental revenue offering local Pop Warner football games, The Simpsons or anything else, in addition to the top 10 movies.

Which brings up another issue -- the ability to secure the top 10 movies. Digital rights management issues still need to be hashed out, making content providers reluctant to offer their best movies. That argument plays to EOD.

"If I can't get the Top 10 movies, EOD Still works," Pohl notes. "Our competitors have been able to say that we don't have the applications. Well, we've just trumped that. The n4 will take any input, off a satellite dish or off a tape, and will send it out -- whether it's IP, QAM, ATM, DSL, whatever. So I think we have equaled our competitors and surpassed some. And now all of our management applications are scalable, too."

Separately, the company just shipped what Pohl called "the largest single VOD unit anywhere on the planet," delivering more than 6,600 simultaneous streams at 2 mbps to 4 mbps from a single piece of content.

The company also reported that it had "aggregated $17.4 million for residential VOD, more than any competitor in 2000, while experiencing a quarterly revenue increase throughout the year."