Flexibility is the key to remaining viable in a changing market for video technologies, agreed a panel of experts speaking at the March 13 meeting of the Society of Satellite Professionals International Mid-Atlantic chapter held in Washington, DC.

With "The Impact of Shifting Video Technologies on the Satellite Market" as the theme, Kurt Riegelman, Intelsat’s senior vice president for Americas sales, implored an audience of professionals to keep their satellite capabilities flexible.

If different, the challenges currently facing the satellite industry are not exactly new, he said. "If you look at an ICO or Iridium, something on the ground has overrun it," Riegelman reminded. "Keep it flexible." Content providers are "buying connectivity to a headend. They’ll be pushing different things over time, but they need connectivity to get the product to market."

While he admitted that "we do a lot of business with fiber [carriers] in a hybrid mode," Riegelman at the same time encounters "a lot more problems with the fiber than satellites." He also noted that demand remains high.

"Can satellites survive? We think so," he said. "The manifests are full, and there are more satellites being built than ever before."

It’s simply the principle of supply and demand at work, said Jerry Butler, PBS Television’s senior director of its interconnection replacement office, and "supply keeps demanding up."

Be it triple-play service to home, phone, video on demand (VoD), HDTV, digital signage, store-and-forward, digital cinema, business TV or hybrid satellite-terrestrial services, "everyone wants what they want when they want it," Butler added. "I don’t know how we keep driving cars with all this stuff [available to distract drivers], but it’s the dynamics of the marketplace."

Currently "there are eight technologies that will have significant influence in the marketplace" as consultant Sidney Skjei (pronounced "Shay") of Skjei Telecom sees them: MPEG-4, DVB-S2, IPTV, HDTV, flexible fiber, mobile video, backward-compatible modulation and JPEG-2000.

Mentioning each by respective strength and weakness, Skjei said MPEG-4 "allows bandwidth to be used more efficiently, and increases the capacity of satellites, [though] conversion at both ends is not as easy as it might be."

Meanwhile, DVB-S2 "has improved coding, though advanced features have not yet seen attention" as it is only in mid-development.

While IPTV "is a way to getting video to anything that can read IPTV," it has problems with packet loss and is in technological need of more robust equipment.

HDTV will stimulate demand, Skjei said, noting that the federal mandate for HDTV compatibility by 2009 "is just starting to be felt." He assumed that programming will catch up to meet demand for it; so much so, he added, that he had just bought and loves a new 62-inch HDTV set.

Flexible fiber "provides fiber capabilities as never before," so invariably "fiber people are finding new ways to provide new services" with it.

Mobile video is finding itself to be a battlefield for intellectual-property rights, yet "we know that handheld will be a huge force," and "if we move to accept it, we’ll find a great deal of opportunity" for its use.

Backward-compatible modulation offers "opportunity to overlay a MPEG-4 network right over top of it and double capacity" though there remain proprietary issues to be worked out for its use.

JPEG-2000, he said, "is a different breed of cat" as it uses a different encoding system which eliminates blocking or squares while offering pictures to giant or small screens alike."

The point of them all, Skjei concluded, is that "keeping an eye on which markets may be affected is something we should all do."

J.J. McCoy