Jaime Miles (left) and Paul Larbey at the Content Delivery Summit in NYC, May 14, 2012

By Jim Guillet, Head of Video & Content Delivery Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent.

What a difference a year makes in our industry. Recently, I attended the Content Delivery Summit in New York City – one of the industry’s leading content delivery network (CDN) conferences. What stood out for me this time – compared to last year’s edition – was the shift from debating “why” service providers should build a CDN to exchanging information on “how” and “how quickly” one can be built. In other words: CDNs – which “cache” content closer to consumers to improve video quality and accommodate faster video streaming at significantly reduced costs – are going mainstream!

Helping foster that debate was our customer, Jaime Miles, VP National Content Operations at Time Warner Cable (TWC). Co-presenting with Paul Larbey, head of Alcatel-Lucent’s Velocix CDN business, they described CDN’s role in extending video delivery at Time Warner Cable. Some of their highlights illustrate how far video delivery has evolved in the last several months:

• Delivering these new video services at scale and with the high resolution and picture quality consumers have come to expect from their payTV operator requires a much more distributed infrastructure (functionality the CDN plays a leading role in providing)
• From a modest start (delivering 25 linear TV channels over their CDN), “TWC TV” (the name of their TV Everywhere service) is now delivering 300 channels and plans more in future – as many as 2,500 aggregated across Time Warner Cable’s serving markets within 12-18 months
• TWC is also planning to use their CDN to expand the number of “online” titles consumers can watch via their video-on-demand service

As Jaime acknowledged, having Alcatel-Lucent set up and operate the CDN was the only way to meet TWC’s aggressive launch timeframes. Today, just over a year since deployment, TWC has begun taking over full operations of the CDN.

Working with TWC, we’ve come a long way in a year. But’s all in due course, as delivering video to IP-connected devices – the way in  which consumers now want to watch TV — is simply fulfilling Time Warner Cable’s long-standing charter of delivering video to consumers in their homes.

Now we’re staying tuned to what’s in store for video in 2013.

Here’s a replay of Jaime Miles’ presentation at Content Delivery Summit. And read more about the award we received at the IP&TV Industry Awards ceremony in this post.