In the first part of this two-part interview, NovelSat Co-Chairman David Furstenberg discussed how the company faced a considerable coalition of skeptical industry experts and engineers that believed it was not possible to have a new modulation for satellite transmission that was higher in efficiency than DVB-S2. In part two, Furstenberg gives Satellite News a glimpse into the future technology that NovelSat plans to bring to the table in the next few years, the new markets that the company is targeting and what those markets will look like as the video consumer evolution continues at a blistering pace.

 

Furstenberg: We were extremely busy at the SATELLITE 2012 show — almost to the point where it could have been a nightmare. We had about eight business personnel at our show booth engaged in a total of more than 220 meetings. Typically, a meeting for us is about an hour long, which includes a 20-minute demonstration of the technology followed by the standard business discussion. For us, trade shows typically serve as the beginning of a business relationship that eventually results in an agreement within six months of the event and initial meeting. We established a pace at SATELLITE 2012 that we are moving forward very aggressively. The technology development companies that are not aggressive tend to die off after a short period of time as the economic downturn creates a very difficult environment to establish your footing. For companies that can leverage a technological advantage and provide efficiency, it’s a golden opportunity.

 

 

Furstenberg: We started by focusing primarily on the video market and we are still very committed to it. We’re currently going after the sports broadcasters. The main reason for this is that I believe sports broadcasting is the content that is really moving the industry. After all, the HD boom would not have happened without sports driving the technology. Sports broadcasters are the most demanding customers for quality and innovation and we see them as a key target.

   Looking ahead, I can see that we are going in a number of different directions. First of all, we are committed internally, not just to hitting the global markets with the best technology, but to translate our capability into real business wins. Our customers would tell us during our product trials that, with the performance of our technology, we were crazy for focusing on one market. So, we are now moving ahead with a similar capability advantage solution for the future-oriented data markets. We are also transferring our technology into an ASIC that will open up new and interesting markets for us.

 

 

Furstenberg: Yes, however it is a little bit early now for the Ka-band market. Though there are many launches taking place for Ka-band satellites, the operators and service providers still don’t have a large customer base for those satellites. But, those customers will come soon and we believe that the market will require, by definition, a much higher data rate than what you have today once the real deployment of Ka-band starts to take place.

   We have a higher data-rate on our solution than the second-best solution by about 230 percent based on industry measurements by the customers that tested our technology. When operating on a 72 megahertz transponder, we’re getting 365 megabits-per-second of throughput compared to 168 megabits-per-second from our competitor. Toward the end of this year, however, we are going to improve our data rate to reach one gigabit-per-second. With that capability, we will be able to handle very, very wide transponders. We are still working on it, so it is not a done deal. What I can say is that we are targeting to handle 250 megahertz and even 550 megahertz transponders.

 

 

Furstenberg: I think that video-on-demand is eventually going to change and be classified as retrieval-on-demand. I believe that the economic climate will force this change and that the next generation of home gateways and set-top-boxes will be equipped with an average of three terabytes of storage. Because we constantly have this rain of video coming down from satellites, consumers can just download a large supply of programming and store the content on these units. A consumer could essentially store all of his or her favorite programming for a vast, extended period of time.

   To do this, you will need to have a wide enough pipe in the home. It is an important business decision of the service provider to determine whether or not they will charge for the service. The customer will soon not need to order movies or games from an on-demand platform. They will be able to just pick it up from their own storage units that are constantly being fed new content. For now, this is all a dream, but I believe that dream can become a reality and, in most cases, it is already a reality for our children.