21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

17 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue believed in, materialised in front of us. It was 2004, and down in the South of Norway a group of stakeholders were all pushing forward on what was – at the time – a pretty progressive and ambitious IPTV project. A Swedish company called Kreatel were manufacturing the set-top boxing, and Tandberg were delivering the headend. A very large and very famous company were operating as the systems integrator and the network guys were also an equally large big player. Long story short, their system didn’t work. What followed was a lot of finger pointing. A lot of buck passing. Huge numbers of indignant ‘it can’t be us, our systems always work’ emails circulated. Round and round the arguments went. Meanwhile, a lot of customers were very unhappy and didn’t have any TV to watch. Cue Bridge turning up with a portable analyser. We placed it close to the source, and we moved it back and back along the network until the problem was identified. Where was the problem? To avoid some red faces I’ll keep that one close to my chest, but the point is what could have taken weeks to unravel at considerable cost was now completed in just half a day. Real-time analytics had in fact completely changed the entire game. Prohibitive expense prevented an investigation in the past; now, it has literally become cheaper to know. Building in this knowledge right from the start heads off problems long before they occur. It was then I knew for certain that the real-time, automated nature of our monitoring solutions allows for broadcasters to provide a highly reliable, usable and cost-effective broadcast to audiences – on a scale that once would have been unthinkable, both logistically and in terms of commercial viability. Companies benefit because they gain competitive advantage and reduce operating costs, audiences benefit because they have a vastly improved QoS and QoE. Social responsibility As net neutrality debates continue to rage we may need to ask ourselves what other ways monitored data might end up being used. Will it be used to monitor who gets what, when? Will it be used to control or limit who gets what, when? What kind of information are we comfortable in extracting from data, and how do we want it be used? Perhaps even more important than those questions is – is it our job to care? It is easy to think as engineers that what we create and develop sits in glorious isolation from the context in which it is used; that what can be done on a technical level is a question for ‘us’, and what they choose to actually do with it - what should be done - relates to ‘them’. But in reality, technology is driven by social and political norms and changes, but also drives them in turn. Do we need to keep that in mind as we push the boundaries of IP forward? Or do we just keep grinding away on the purely technical, leaving the politicians and the public and the social scientists to make the ‘big’ decisions? Few of us could claim that our business practices have a political agenda – indeed, even as I write about the intertwined nature of sociology, politics and technology, I’m not trying to break the system, push an agenda or create a revolution. Overt politicism for businesses is rarely wise, and I couldn’t even pretend to have drawn any fixed conclusions to many of the rhetorical questions I’ve posed throughout. I have no intention to make any statements about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I just think that from an intellectual point it’s fascinating to take a step back and review the technological progress we’ve made, and then try and map that against the sociological and political changes we’ve experienced. Which is the chicken? Which is the egg? Which is the master and which is the slave? It is possible our innovations - be they in monitoring or in any other sphere of technological progress - have been driven by the demand for them. It is also possible, though unlikely, that they have arisen out of a vacuum and in turn gone on to inspire and facilitate fundamental changes in the social sphere. And if we can even begin to get a handle on those questions in relation to the progresses we’ve secured in the past, then what can we possibly predict about our future? Technology is driven by social and political norms and changes, but also drives them in turn. Do we need to keep that in mind as we push the boundaries of IP forward? scte long read