IPv6 multicast extends the reach of satellite service

SKY Perfect Communications

SKY Perfect Communications, a familiar name to Japanese satellite TV viewers with its broadcasting service SKY PerfecTV!, is also growing business in video and file data delivery service for corporate users. The company launched a new service called SKY Stream Service in the summer of 2003. This is a video streaming service using terrestrial network based on IPv6 multicast, offered to complement video service over satellite.

Kunihiko Ikeda, General Manager of Communication Systems Department, said, “Terrestrial network will evolve further in the days to come. General video contents may be streamed over terrestrial networks in the future. We would like to build service infrastructure that would allow us to deliver contents through the best mix of communication media.”


Grasping new customers with media mix

Advantage of satellite video delivery is that it can send the same video to numerous sites all at once. It has attracted many corporate users especially in service industry for various purposes including sending messages by the company president. But such video delivery with satellite is not free from some drawbacks. As general broadcast TV viewers might experience, some user sites may not be able to receive satellite signals because of buildings or other obstacles in the direction of satellite used by SKY Perfect Communications. For underground sites, this problem is a big headache.

Usually, setting up antennas on the roof of building which houses the receiver would contain the issue. But, antenna setup and wiring in the building can cost as much as 1 million yen for one site. Normal installation cost for building tenants is about 200,000 to 300,000 yen.

“Satellite communication gives businesses with many sites with huge advantage in running cost. But some companies cannot make a decision to use it if the initial cost would be, say 100 million yen for all sites”, says Ikeda.

SKY Perfect Communications therefore explored the possibility of using complementary terrestrial services, and invited proposals from several service providers. But it was difficult to find an acceptable solution with acceptable cost.

The company wanted a stable solution that would allow them to send MPEG-2 video to many sites simultaneously, although it is positioned as complementary to its satellite service. High video quality is required, as it is not another “Internet video streaming” for consumers. It meant that the sending station needed to be given a huge bandwidth.

But Asia Netcom proposed a solution using IPv6, which persuaded SKY Perfect Communications of cost and quality of service.

In the world of current IPv4, multicasting is very hard to do, forcing almost all Internet video delivery service to be unicast-based. The more a corporate user has sites to deliver video to, the more bandwidth is required at the sending station, leading to steep rise in communication service cost for SKY Perfect Communications. But IPv6 allows building of flexible multicast environment. The sending station only needs to send one stream, which leads to huge savings on bandwidth as well as better control of video quality.

The above applies to transmission of video streams from the broadcasting center in Aomi, Tokyo to corporate user sites. In the meantime, the company was also looking for a cost effective solution for getting video material feed from the user. Corporate users using video service by SKY Perfect Communications needed to have dedicated line for video feed to Aomi Broadcasting Center, just as general TV program providers would do. That may not be a prohibitive deal for companies which happens to have the headquarters near Aomi, but if a company wants to feed video material from, say, Yokohama, it would cost 1 million yen a month, although the company may use the service only once a week for one hour at a time.

With such large cost for companies in the suburb of Tokyo, it is nearly impossible to use this service in other districts of Japan.

Therefore, SKY Perfect Communications decided to use Internet-based service for this purpose, too, with IPv6 multicast implementation. Guliver International, used automobile dealership firm, is the first customer of this new service.

In SKY Stream, B Flet’s, optical access service by NTT, is used for connecting sites for material receipt and video distribution. The access network service is connected to VPNs between NTT POPs and Aomi Broadcast Center of SKY Perfect Communications.

On the use of IPv6, Kiyohiro Takenaka, Manager at Platform Technology Department, said, “Use of IPv6 in video delivery can be very simple. There is no need to run DNS, for example. Each set top boxes can be identified by fixed IP address. Such information can be used to control video streams to certain terminals at a certain company, or to remotely configure these terminals.” Video material feed is one to one communication. Therefore IPv4 can be used without any issue. But the company decided to use IPv6 multicast here. “Our broadcast center needs to make necessary data conversion to deliver video over satellite right now. But if and when our customers want to build a mobile video feed environment, or they want to use other video formats like MPEG-4, they can directly send out video to their sites with us working as a communication hub,” said Takenaka.

Diagram of SKY Stream video delivery service

Diagram of SKY Stream material feed service

Beyond satellite-only service

About the possibility of this new service, Ikeda points out, “With IPv6, we can presume that all routers support multicast. There are issues such as low penetration of IPv6 as well as network equipment cost. Service providers with only terrestrial network may not reach profitability for the same type of business. But core competence of SKY Perfect Communications right now is satellite communications. We don’t necessarily have to make money from terrestrial bit. Now we can go to our prospects who may not have done business with us just because they have a few sites which cannot receive satellite signals, and say we’re sure we can serve them well.”

Wouldn’t satellite communications, core business for SKY Perfect Communications, be threatened by further development in terrestrial networking?

Ikeda says, B Flet’s is the only economical terrestrial access service that can meet the criteria for corporate communications, which is too expensive to replace satellite-based video delivery at SKY Perfect Communications customers, because of the number of sites. The ability of satellites to cover all parts of Japan would likely be maintained for a long while.

“We can grasp a good share of the business satellite video market by expanding to terrestrial networking, which other satellite communication providers cannot do”, says Ikeda “We also have an advantage over terrestrial service providers of having broadcasting expertise applied to communications. In the future, terrestrial networks might be used to carry general broadcasting traffic. Even if that happens, our advantage remains in collecting image-centric contents and deliver them cost-effectively. We would like to keep developing new services based on expertise of maintaining terrestrial network services.”