Motorola may have reached a turning point in the European IPTV stakes, with a landmark deal to provide a HD DVR to Deutsche Telekomm’s T-Home Entertain service, which has already acquired 200,000 customers in Germany.
While the name Sigma Designs is nowhere on the announcement, this is Deutsche taking the Microsoft Mediaroom approved chipset from Sigma, and looking around for someone that can do a better (read cheaper) job on larger volumes. The incumbents ‘ and we have no way of knowing which of them has the majority of the installed base ‘ were Cisco via the Danish KISS subsidiary that it bought in 2005 and merged into Linksys and then Scientific Atlanta, and Tatun, and this must be considered a major set back in Europe, losing if not one of the largest accounts, an account that promises to be one of the largest in Europe in the future.
The existing T-Home X 300T Media Receiver enables high-definition (HD) DVR function with an 80 GB hard drive a dual DVB-T tuner as well and this will now give way to Motorola’s VIP1616E set-top to be known to T-Home customers as Media Receiver 300 Type A.
Given that Deutsche Telekom has twice dropped its pricing this year for IPTV, and as a result expects to reach 500,000 subscribers by the end 2008 that makes this a likely 300,000 boost to Motorola shipment numbers, at the very top of its range IPTV device.
But as far as we can see these are still first generation HD devices and the new Sigma chip announced in April and the news in January that Broadcom was porting Mediaroom to its chipset, have still yet to filter through to the IPTV community
The new Sigma SMP8654 will make it possible to offer services such as PC-to-TV, photo and music sharing and also DVR Anywhere. The Broadcom BCM7405 system on a chip will also allow service providers and set top makers to support whole-home DVR, high-performance user interfaces, and photo and music sharing. So don’t expect these services at Deutsche any time soon. That’s because the chip in the new Motorola VIP1616E set-top that Deutsche is taking is a 400 DMIP chip (Dhrystone MIPS) compared to the 1100-DMIPS of the second generation Broadcom device.
Motorola acquired its way into the IPTV set top market when it bought Swedish specialist Kreatel in January 2006.