Analysts: Emerging SDV to boost HD cable TV scene

If consumers aren't that thrilled yet with the quality and quantity of high-definition TV programming, maybe an emerging technology called switched digital video (SDV) will come to the rescue, suggests In-Stat.

How might SDV help? Essentially, the technology will distribute video more efficiently over cable TV coax lines, according to a new report from industry analyst firm In-Stat.

In-Stat analysts project the worldwide SDV market will grow from $165 million in 2008 to $1 billion in 2012, ostensibly driven by consumer demand for services such as HDTV and video-on-demand (VoD).

Large cable TV systems will be the first to deploy SDV, but medium-sized systems will become an important segment by 2009 and small cable TV systems after 2011. North America will lead the way, In-Stat believes, followed by Asia and Europe.

If you're checking the date of this article to make sure it was written in this century, it may be because you're experiencing deja vu all over again. As early as 1996, analysts predicted, "SDV is the wave of the future." It was supposed to be the solver of the big problem of getting all those digital signals into a confined bandwidth; and during the last decade, it was thought SDV would be the catalyst for cable systems' switch to digital.

It would have been, but the bigger problem has been all that existing infrastructure. Only now has HDTV become the principal driver toward consumer adoption of digital cable. But even with a good chunk of that infrastructure now already replaced once, and with consumers expecting their cable systems to carry broadcast signals in HD (there's no government requirement for them to do so), the old problem has once again reared its ugly head: There may soon be too many channels for the available CATV bandwidth of many regions.

And thus the old solution looms on the horizon, this time in the role it was born to play: "emerging technology." Once again, analysts foresee an entire industry forming around SDV technology, driven presumably by the nature of evolution itself...the same nature that was supposed to have fostered an SDV-centric CATV industry by 2000.

In another recent survey conducted by ABI Research, analysts found that while 41% of TV owners in the US now possess an HDTV, only 56% of those same consumers subscribe to an HD programming package.

Still, taken together, this recent research seems to leave some big questions unanswered. For example, will providers charge subscribers more for cable network TV services that handle video more efficiently -- and if so, will the extra price seem worthwhile to consumers? Moreover, will the availability of SDV-enabled cable TV spur broadcasters to produce more content that viewers really care about looking at in HD format?