When we first met Zoran at IBC a few years ago, we thought that perhaps it was a company that wasn’t really in the fast lane for digital media, and that it was more suited to the established order in entertainment technology. But one look at what it had on show at IBC showed it has begun to ‘get’ what the digital future is about. DVD Chips, digital camera and imaging chips were all on show and the company is now throwing itself into terrestrial broadcast markets for High Definition TV.
The $500 million company known for its DSP style development has looked like a tiny Texas Instruments, but will now take on Broadcom, Trident, AMD’s ATI, NXP and Taiwan’s MediaTech, in the digital TV space.
Zoran was showing both a HD version of the US ATSC standard and a HD version of DVB-T at the show. The US market digital terrestrial market is one pushed by the US government, in order to release vital UHF spectrum, and since HD is already part of that specification, it is likely to take off before DVB-T HD.
Jun Kawaguchi, director of product marketing for HD at Zoran said, ‘In the US the chip has to accept both HD and SD signals right off. We see ATSC through the air broadcasts as just 10% of the US TV market with cable taking 60% and satellite another 30%, and that makes it a 30 million chip a year market.
‘In Europe there is a tangible benefit to consumers for adopting DVB-T and later, as HD for DVB-T rolls out in 40 or so countries that will become the far greater market,’ Kawaguchi added.
Zoran’s new family of 1080p processors for the ATSC market support 1 billion colors, have 1080i to 1080p deinterlacing, and come as single chips and can drive up to 1680 by 1050 screen definitions. The company also sees a market in US for having ATSC cards added to PCs for watching HD TV on a PC, especially since Vista has pre-loaded the relevant software to handle a HD ATSC stream.