21581 - SCTE Broadband August2022 COMPLETE v1

86 Vol. 44 No. 3 - September 2022 Issue from the archive (c) Allowing at 1981 cost £150 per subscriber for new installations and £100 for updating an existing subscriber, plus inflation 10% p.a. the cost after 7 years to a 5m total becomes £800 million approximately. This compares with a USA cost for 5.1m subscribers of $1.23 or £683m. This calculation assumes that the existing approximate 2.5m subscribers would be updated in the first 4 years at the same time as new installations were proceeding at a moderate 250,000 per year. Subsequently the concentration would be on new installations at a 500,000 (increasing) rate per year. These estimates take no account of capital cost for central equipment e.g. programme origination, head-ends and the like, nor scramble or descramble equipment. Subscription TV Direct or via Satellite As will have been already appreciated, the financial success of Cable TV in the USA has been very largely dependent on the additional revenue provided over the basic service by the Pay (We call it subscription advisedly!) premium channels. In the USA much of the transmission over the longer distances involved is by communication satellite (4GHz) not generally receivable by ordinary home viewers, direct to the local cable services. Apart from a few experimental cases there is no large scale direct broadcast satellite transmission as is now planned for the UK in 1986. This will therefore be a new factor in the UK case, where it is anticipated that many homes will rely on cable to provide the DBS reception. The main reason is likely to be cost of the home dish installation compared to cable but also some homes will be unsuitably located for installation of dish aerials to receive at low angles of elevation. Additionally in the UK case, we may well use communication satellites to provide a wider range of international programmes for cable. Whether receiving by satellite or more conventional means, cable companies need to provide security on those distribution channels calling for additional subscription (against interception by unauthorised people). There has been far from general agreement in the USA on common systems and standards of equipment to be used for this purpose and costs are higher than is desirable. This is an area worth detailed examination in the UK before major decisions are taken. I believe the BBC have yet to decide on what form of encryption (scrambling) they will use for the DBS channel. It is acknowledged that the problem does not arise in a centrally switched distribution system as each subscriber has his own wire (or fibre) and scrambling is not required. Virtually every company that has looked at the question concluded that the most cost effective compromise for collecting payment for premium channels was on a monthly subscription basis rather than a pay-per- programme arrangement. With future develop- ment of 2- way services as per Qube, the point may be worth re- examination for special channels on a non-urgent basis. For monitoring purposes, to measure viewing audiences it is also very desirable to have central indication of programme popularity - again a 2-way possibility. Services other than Entertainment In reviewing what is available in the USA, I have already touched on some outgoing services which will undoubtedly be made available as cable grows in the UK. These would include the following: (a) Full time channel of News, Time, Weather and General Information (b) Sports channel with local variations (c) Children ' s channel including some educational items (d) Parliamentary channel including relaying from Westminster etc. (e) Local authority and local community channel (f) Educational channel: providing a variety of courses, subjects and levels (g) Datatext channel - like Teletext - but additional information including 'Cable What ' s On' - items for deaf people, local advertising etc. Other services, mostly requiring engineering and commercial development would require a 2-way capability. These include: (a) home security (b) voting on various matters from preferences on programmes to government policy (local or central) (c) armchair shopping (d) video communication (e) various interactive games etc. etc. So long as the basic capability is built into the system, many of these services would be progressively introduced over the years as appropriate. Optical Fibres—What Contribution? I referred earlier to the uncertainty, mainly in respect of cost but also in respect of engineering and production readiness for applications to large scale distribution networks of optical fibres. The advantages of optical fibres over conventional `wire' systems are well known i.e. (1) lower attenuation of a few dB per km (2) higher information-bandwidth capacity (3) smaller size and lower weight (4) avoidance of electrical radiation problems Against these advantages must be set the following disadvantages: (1) the problem of making loss-free glass joints in the practical field case 30 Cable Television Engineering