Intel showed just how important control of the digital home is for its future, by making its first 45 nanometer SoC chip the new CE4100, aimed at driving the internet video-to-TV transition.
It showed the chip at last month’s Intel Developer Forum in Santa Clara, California, designed entirely to facilitate internet content being consumed on digital TVs, Blu-ray players and set tops, and this week UK set top maker Amino has already come out with a new IPTV set top based on it.
The new chip now appears to be part of the Intel Atom family and was previously known as Sodaville on Intel roadmaps, and it contains the Atom core as part of its processing element. The chip however has far more to it than that. It has a display processor, graphics processor, video display controller, transport processor and a dedicated security processor (for DRM decryption support).
The chip cycles at 1.2GHz but is said to be low power and small footprint, is backward compatible with the CE3100 and supports hardware decode of up to two 1080p video streams. New features added since the CE3100 include a hardware decode for DivX and an integrated NAND flash controller (so OEMs can attach lots of Flash memory to create cheap DVRs).
So anyone who was happily developing for the Intel CE3100 chip might not yet be taking advantage of those new features, but could announce support immediately for the CE4100 due to it being backwards compatible.
Intel talked at the launch about TVs being built on this chip which blend video, 3-D animation, graphics (supports OpenGL 2.0) and interactivity. So that reads, plays internet video, drives game play and allows a response to the internet for advertising applications.
Intel made a point of saying it is working with Adobe Systems to port Flash Player 10 and it is a big bet that all future consumer electronics devices will be optimized for playback of Flash based H.264 video.
Executives from Adobe, the BBC, CBS, Cisco and TransGaming all paid homage to the device at launch and we mustn’t forget how Intel launched the CE3100 alongside the Yahoo TV Widget system, and Intel also showed new widgets from Accedo Broadband, The Associated Press, BIGSTAR.tv, CBS, CinemaNow, Dailymotion, Immediatek, Mediafly, MyVideo, Netflix, PlayJam, RadioTime, RallyPoint, ShowTime Networks, Tagesschau and WhereverTV.
Amino said as it announced its new IPTV set top based on the chip that it is now working with a number of customers to introduce a new hybrid broadcast/OTT STB.
So that’s a set top that receives digital broadcasts (which can be cable, satellite or terrestrial) and at the same time plugs directly into your home router or PC to bring internet video to the TV screen.
Amino CTO Dominique Le Foll said, ‘The CE4100 is a powerful media processor designed specifically for home entertainment and enables a greatly enhanced consumer experience. As one of the first IPTV solutions providers to demonstrate its capabilities, we are very encouraged by the response from customers and partners ‘ particularly to its OTT capabilities.’
The way we think of new TV widgets is like the App Store that Apple operates for the iPhone. If you buy one of these over the top enabled TVs, suddenly, instead of flicking through 300 (or more) TV channels, you are going to be using intelligent search tools and the recommendations of friends and the general public, to find larger and larger sources of content delivered over the internet, which are widget enabled. This is analogous to the way iPhone enthusiasts tell each other about applications (sometimes useless and frivolous, but at least short term fun) which leads to a constant meandering through new experiences on the phone, completely ignoring the two reasons we all bought the iPhone in the first place ‘ 1) As a phone 2) As a media player.
So it’s going to rapidly become the same on the TV. Widgets from TV broadcasters may come first, but also they will come from content library owners (studios) and from pure internet video services such as YouTube and others. The TV was supposed to be for 1) Watching broadcast TV or 2) Watching stored or DVD held video – but like the iPhone App Store transition, it will become a way of exploring the internet video universe.
The only question is whether or not Yahoo widgets are deemed to be the way to go, or whether other widget factories get into the game quickly enough. If they don’t, then Intel could benefit hugely. As in the App Store, expect a huge number of gaming widgets once these devices proliferate.
If Amino thinks it is time to embrace the Intel route, then expect more IPTV set top companies to go down that route, even if it is just to cover the Amino move (or because there are RFPs out there among operators), followed eventually by major CE TV makers such as Sony and Samsung.
Already European CE specialist Conceptronic says it is working on a media player using the Intel CE3100 processor, so expect it to upgrade this to the CE4100 any day.