In a single set top deal, Intel has compromised future set top business for traditional cable suppliers at 15 million European cable TV homes, at Liberty Global. For every set top box delivered from this multi-vendor deal ‘ from a combination of Intel, NDS, Nagravision and Samsung – a traditional cable set top maker is likely to lose a customer.
We use the word compromised because it’s not yet understood just how many of these devices will ship at first and they are not shipped until the first half of 2011. The deal was announced last week at a US cable show, and it is likely that initially at least, these devices will be for top end customers who want to access both cable TV, traditional VoD and DVR, plus internet video content. The home gateways will also carry VoIP and other internet data such as html pages.
But these devices, described as media home gateways, are all IP, a move that could replace cable set tops completely in the homes where they are taken. As cable in Europe goes unerringly towards using the IP protocol, this means that traditional cable set top suppliers such as Arris, Motorola and Cisco will have to replace their cable QAM based set tops, which rely on localized tuners, and come out with at least some devices which help their customers move to an all IP infrastructure.
We have been saying for over a year that the new Intel CE 4100, now described as part of the Atom family of chips, had the potential to disrupt the consumer electronics market and in particular the set top business. It is already at the heart of a move by Telecom Italia to introduce a set top that can operate over any IP based connection, offering adaptive streaming on an Over The Top basis. Amino Communications won that deal with an Intel CE 4100 based set top, but this didn’t replace an existing design. As TV operators everywhere are looking for a powerful chip that can deal with internet connectivity and multiple video formats, Intel is starting to edge out traditional set top chip suppliers with the Atom.
The first version of the chip was dubbed the 3100 and was not sold as part of the Atom range, but already it had a high-performance IA processing core, dedicated video decoding hardware, and included support for Adobe Flash Player. It also had dedicated multi-channel audio DSPs, a powerful 3D-graphics engine, a security processor and support for multiple peripherals. The new 4100 simply took this a step further by dropping the geometry from 90nm to a 45nm process and adding display controllers, and upping the number of concurrent video streams it could deal with. It is already capable of running both Android and its own MeeGo Linux variant, which it offers with Nokia for handsets, and will probably also support Chrome OS when it arrives.
It is up against similar sophisticated Broadcom SoC chips as well as the more traditional Sigma and STMicro set top chips.
Recently TiVo won out for a top end device at Virgin Media, which means that all of the high end Virgin customer base is likely to go to a TiVo ‘ again a complete turnabout from existing cable TV set tops. However the TiVo sits on a MIPS based core on a Broadcom chip, so this at least doesn’t represent an incursion to the traditional set top chip leadership.
The other issue at Virgin is that it allows the cableco to go off footprint and supply TV services to anyone with a 10 Mbps or better broadband line, including a telco supplied DSL line, and this may also be possible in the new Liberty Global device and we’ve dropped Liberty a few questions to see if they are happy to confirm this, but so far haven’t heard.
But it would make a lot of sense if the device was a full hybrid, able to take video over a DOCSIS cable modem or a DSL device ‘ which after all are both output through Ethernet cabling. Given that DOCSIS doesn’t gain from any QoS services at the cable company its IP path is completely comparable with fast DSL and Liberty Global did describe the device as revolutionary.
The user interface will integrate video content, widgets, apps, and an advanced search and recommendation engine, with Samsung building the device, Intel supplying the chips, and the middleware and user experience coming from Israeli conditional access firm NDS. This will be built around Adobe Flash and use the MediaHighway middleware of NDS and its Snowflake UI.
Snowflake has already won a number of awards, one at IBC last year, and is a UI built around a minimalist 3D grid, overlaid over live TV, controlled by a remote with a minimal set of six keys. It looks the same on any device whether TV, PC, or phone and the latest versions of Snowflake offer integration to social networks.
Interestingly Nagravision is the incumbent conditional access supplier at Liberty Global, and it will continue this onto the new box.
But this is not just a set top, it is an entire home based system. It can extend around the home either through wired connectivity using MoCA or wireless using WiFi. So multiple TV sets can be driven from it at once. It will also adhere to the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) ecosystem, a series of APIs for controlling multiple screens in the digital home, usually from a single remote control.
Liberty Global’s President and CEO Mike Fries said, ‘This revolutionary platform will provide LGI’s customers in Europe with a groundbreaking new product that has long been anticipated but never delivered: a seamless, intuitive way for people to access their live, time-shifted, on-demand, and web-based content on the television.’
The multimedia home gateway is scheduled for deployment in Europe, where Liberty operates mostly under the UPC brand and where 15 million of its 17 million customer homes are, from the first half of 2011.
The company says that it will join the Liberty line-up of digital set-top boxes, so clearly it has no plans to replace these overnight, but we would expect this device to ship in 100,000s almost straight away and be accompanied by a substantial advertising campaign for the services provided to it.