Invites for meetings at IBC are now clogging our inbox and the inboxes of anyone that has admitted that they are going to the International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam in a few weeks, but one release that caught our imagination was from NXP which wants to demo a DVB-T2 transmission at the show.
DVB-T2 is a natural target for any chip maker, but especially if it is European and the standard was not supposed to have been complete until late this year, but instead came out more or less done by June. All across Europe broadcasting networks and broadcasters are already playing with the standard and so naturally chip makers are keen to get in on the act early.
While this is the first chip company that we have heard of attacking this market, it will be one of the major chip markets going forwards. We assume that over time, perhaps as long as 10 years, each of the existing 35 countries that have adopted DVB-T will eventually adopt DVB-T2. In many cases the two will run side by side, so that all of the 60 million DVB-T receivers that have been made with DVB-T in them, will either have a DVB-T2 replacement or a DVB-T2 chip alongside the DVB-T chips.
But of course most markets have not yet saturated with DVB-T, far from it, and although it is primarily a low price, high volume set top market with devices going as low as $40 (so chips are priced around $2 to $3) initially the DVB-T2 market will represent rich pickings, at lower yields and higher prices. The UK, France, Italy and Spain are perhaps the most developed markets, while Germany has a service, there are probably more cellphone viewers using DVB-T there than they are home set tops, due to the high penetration of cable. Overall in a world that has around 220 million DVB chip sets already installed, about 60 million of these are DVB-T, with the rest either DVB-C cable or DVB-S satellite designs. The DVB-T terrestrial market is by far the most recent to develop and that 60 million has arrived over just four years from a standing start.
So that will grow until there are up to 3 receivers in each household, and the accelerated switch-off of analog TV services mostly by 2012 in Europe, and by 2015 in most other countries, means that for the next seven years the DVB-T and DVB-T2 chip markets will provide cash cows for the company that gets most design wins.
Even tiny French DiBcom, which has started up on the back of DVB-T and DVB-H chipsets, has already shipped 10 million devices on its own.
So the digital switch off will take the DVB-T and DVB-T2 homes up to around 100 million in Europe alone, with between 2 and 3 devices per home, making this a 300 million chip market on its own, over a multi-year period, and thereafter a fat annualized replacement market, potentially bigger than broadband modems in unit numbers.
With ASEAN and Australia and Russia, Scandinavia, South Africa and India all opting to use DVB-T, but in the early stages of implementation, this means that another 150 million homes (we are not counting many for India because there is so much low value cable and DTH pay TV there) and again with multiple devices per home becoming the norm in some of these countries, that adds perhaps another 300 million devices to ship between now and 2015.
If we add DVB-H to that, it gets personal and it’s not 1 device per home but one chip per handset and laptop, plus specialist portable devices and MP3 dongles and such ‘ another 120 million or so chips over a similar time frame, even if DVB-H garners only 50% of the global handset market for broadcast mobile TV and it may get far more. Now we acknowledge that DVB-H signals are very different in design from DVB-T, but most companies are adapting one chip to handle both, and will go to market with the same device.
And finally we have South America, where the only clear winners have been Mexico, which has adopted the US’s ATSC, and Brazil, which has taken ISDB-T technology from Japan. The rest of the countries there, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Columbia and Ecuador and a handful of others, are all considering their options with DVB-T very much in the mix up against ISDB-T, ATSC and even China’s DMB-T/H. So when Columbia this week declared that it would go with DVB-T, with its 42 million population, that perhaps put pressure on the other South American countries which have made little progress in deciding a digital terrestrial standard for the past two years, mainly because they all wanted to see how the Brazilian experiment with ISDB-T goes. In the end this probably adds the potential for 30 million more homes and as many as 100 million devices over a longer period than between now and 2015, but any positive decisions there will strengthen the DVB-T chip market.
All of which points to any eventual installed base in DVB-T and associated standards, of around 800 million devices, and that the DVB-T2 chip market, which will support HD services far more easily, is likely to be a shade more, and further down the track. No wonder there is a headlong rush to be first to market with DVB-T2, which is expected to be deployed in Europe first and most densely in the UK from 2009 on.
NXP recently acquired the set top operations of Conexant to make itself a top three technology player in the DTV and STB markets and thinks it will be first to market with a DVB-T2 chip.
Last week Digital TV Labs opened its test services for DVB-T2, ready to prove compliance for 2009 shipped devices, which suggests that NXP won’t be on its own for very long. ST Micro is sure to expect to dominate this market, coupling it with its MPEG decoder chips, and Broadcom, fresh from its acquisition last month of the AMD digital TV operations, which it said will give it chip offerings the length and breadth of the market, will also be headed into this area, along with various Chinese and Taiwanese suppliers and a handful of start ups. Broadcom came out with its first DVB-T chip in February, but billed it as a low power DVB-H chip as well.
This week ST Micro achieved a design win with Proview a flat-panel TV maker to put its XPS-1000 set-top chip into HD Brazilian set tops, which use Japan’s ISDB-T. ISDB-T is only supported in Japan and Brazil, so if that’s a big enough market (total population across both countries is about 300 million with perhaps 100 million households) to interest the company, the DVB-T2 market will certainly attract its attention.
DVB-T2 uses OFDM modulation, the same as DVB-T and DVB-H, but error correction means that signaling modes such as 256 QAM can now be catered for as well as QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM, and these are offered with a huge variety of guard intervals and the number of OFDM carriers now rises from 8,000 to include both 16,000 and 32,000, making for more complicated, and initially more expensive chips.
Meanwhile the MPEG LA has lost the remit for licensing the patent pool for DVB-T technology to rival licensing authority, Italy based Sisvel. The patent pool works in favor of France Telecom, Panasonic and JVC at present, though no reasons were given for the change, it might suggest that there will be a change in strategy for collecting royalties and offering licenses to the technology. There may also be additional claimants for essential patents.