Alcatel-Lucent is developing a new technology architecture that will enable pay-TV providers to offer the ability to store favourite TV programmes in the cloud cost effectively while maintaining compliance with content rights legislation.

In many countries today, copyright laws concerning television follow a ‘private copy’ model. This means each consumer must have their own copy of a TV programme they have recorded. This makes network recording services uneconomical due to the cost of storage being hundreds of times higher than in a ‘shared copy’ model where only one recording is kept for all consumers.

Alcatel-Lucent’s ‘virtual private copy architecture’ solves this issue by combining economical tiered storage with enhanced intelligence in the Velocix Content Delivery Network (CDN) to enable pay TV providers to cost-effectively deploy private copy cloud recording and comply with copyright laws.

Every time a user wants to record a programme, Velocix Scheduler logs the request and initiates the recording. One recording is made per user, in accordance with content rights. These recordings can be kept in simple, low-cost storage archives as they do not require fast and frequent access. Innovative new techniques in the Velocix CDN allow the distribution of unique recordings in a method that can be cached.

Compared to a private copy environment, Alcatel-Lucent’s virtual private copy architecture means storage costs can be reduced by up to 75 per cent. As playback comes directly from the CDN, latency is also reduced, improving the quality of experience for users.

Paul Larbey, head of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Video business: “We’ve been talking with several customers about ways to help them comply with content rights issues and still offer their customers the advantages of cloud DVR services. This new architecture is the result of those discussions and removes the single biggest barrier to deployment – the cost of storage in a private copy environment.”

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