Backtalk

People New Faces at Arroyo Arroyo Video Solutions recently appointed Dr. John Pickens vice president of technology and Tom Foster vice president of national accounts. Pickens will take the lead in the development of Arroyo’s streaming media technologies, while Foster will drive strategy and relationships within North American cable. Pickens served as CTO and vice president of technology at COM21. Most recently, Pickens has consulted for a number of leading technology companies and organizations, including CableMatrix and CableLabs, and he serves on the board of advisors of several others. Previously, Pickens held several senior roles in companies such as 3Com, CSI and Bell North Research. Prior to joining Arroyo, Foster was vice president of engineering for Time Warner Cable in Rochester, NY. He was previously vice president of network services, engineering and local programming for Time Warner Communications in Rochester, NY. Before joining Time Warner, Foster held various senior management positions at Scripps Howard Cable in Sacramento, CA, Greater Rochester Cablevision in Rochester, NY, and American Cablevision in Indianapolis. Imake Names Tran VP of Application Development Imake has promoted David Tran to vice president of application development. Tran will lead the team that supports the development of applications and user interfaces that comprise the back-office portion of the OpenVision product suite. Previously, Tran was Imake’s director of technology. Since joining Imake in 1995, Tran served in various analytical roles and was one of the early architects behind the e.merge video on demand (VOD) platform. Tran’s professional expertise includes java development, VOD software design and development, and systems architecture and design. Prior to joining IMAKE, Tran worked in application development roles at organizations that included IBM and SAIC. Letters to the Editor Here’s a letter we received in response to a question posed in Pipeline’s "Broadband Soapbox." What to do with 100 Mbps? Because bandwidth needs have been so consistently underestimated in the past, there is a tendency to think that the need for more bandwidth is never-ending. However, the human body limits the maximum data rate that a subscriber can consume. The human eye is the highest bandwidth "input device." HDTV with 1080p is pretty close to filling this input device with the maximum bandwidth it can accept. In addition, after the long specification and adoption process (which is still ongoing) with HDTV, it is unlikely that we will see an even higher bandwidth HDTV standard than what is being adopted today for 20 years or more. Therefore, we can use the bandwidth of an HDTV channel as the maximum unit that can be `consumed’ by a single subscriber. The next question is how many simultaneous consumers per subscriber? Perhaps four simultaneous HDTV channels is enough. (Some have suggested that more is necessary to feed an HD-DVR while the subscribers are watching other channels; however, a DVR is not necessary with true VOD.) If we assume that one HDTV channel takes 20 Mbps, we obtain 80 Mbps. If we assume some simultaneous broadband netsurfing, music and VoIP, etc., we might add another 20 Mbps and we have reached 100 Mbps. It may be that we are coming to the end of the bandwidth road with DOCSIS 3.0. Hal Roberts