We have to say that multi-room DVRs have never really turned us on at Faultline, but perhaps it was an oversight. We have been busy the past 7 or 8 years thinking that getting a DVR into every home would take forever and was progressing not nearly as fast as DVD players, and that the next step was the perhaps one other room, or maybe two that might need access to the content on the DVR.
But the DirecTV Whole Home system launched this week, appears to be able to reach up to 15 separate rooms in the home ‘ connected by MoCA coaxial cabling, and we suspect that somewhere down the line Wi-Fi will come as well. All of this focuses on the idea of using cheap digital media adapters on TV sets, and a single DVR (or maybe two) for the whole home.
What we are seeing here is the spark of a technological battle which no-one has yet won, but where DirecTV has taken on the most minor lead. And yet it is pinning its hopes for the coming quarter, almost entirely on stealing customers away from cable and Dish using this offer. Last quarter it added only 100,000 and the quarter before that just 119,000, with Dish beating it in both quarters.
Let’s tell you why there is so much further to go, but first we have to fill out the details of the offer. At the heart of it is the existing HD DVR used by DirecTV. We’re unsure of who physically produces the device because we think that there are multiple manufacturers, but we know that NDS played a large part in the device’s design, replacing TiVos which dominated within DirecTV, in a decision going back to around 2004.
But a quick review of the RVU Alliance web page, an organization which came to light back in August 2009, isolates the grouping we think is behind this. DirecTV is the only operator and is working with Cisco’s Scientific Atlanta set top team and Samsung’s to build this thing, built around Broadcom processor chips. The MoCA connectors use Entropic chips.
Since that group was formed, all the relevant chip vendors ‘ STMicro and Sigma ‘ along with the remaining leaders in set tops, Pace, Motorola, Humax, LG and Technicolor, have also become aligned with the RVU Alliance.
What RVU (pronounced R-vue) is all about is an implementation of Whole Home DVRs which use both DLNA selected standards and DTCP-IP content protection. We know that DirectTV uses NDS conditional access, but we think that protection is extended to ‘streams’ of content which go to the cheaper Adaptor set tops, using DTCP. These are simply an MPEG-4 AVC decoder and a network interface card with DTCP support, and nothing else. Very cheap.
The thrust of a major advertising program which DirecTV is about to launch is that you can’t get a whole home experience from anyone else, including all of the US cablecos and its great satellite rival Dish. Well this lead is not strictly true and anyway it will be shortlived, partly because in order to have second sources for the devices, DirecTV has had to open up the spec to all these other suppliers and they can supply the same types of devices to rival operators, but also the moment that DirecTV goes to market with this, Dish, Comcast and others will have to come up with an answer, within a quarter.
Dish has already launched its TV Everywhere service, confusingly named because in actual fact it is a placeshifting system, built around Sling Media technology, but which we imagine has been altered in much the same way ‘ although we can find no reference to the Sling based ViP 922 devices using DTCP. DirecTV advertising suggests that Dish TV Everywhere doesn’t allow you to throw the content around your home ‘ this is wrong, it does, but perhaps not in HD. It criticizes Dish’s DuoDVR, because it is restricted to just two rooms, similar to many of the multi-room DVR operations of the US cablecos.
The exception here might be Cox, which in May said that it would take a Cisco designed multiroom DVR, but it additionally would support delivery of internet video from its TV Everywhere offering and allow for Tru2way interactivity. But by year end, not one of the existing cable players in the US will be able to resist some kind of shift to massively multi-room.
But the trouble with the DirecTV offering is that the headline figure of attaching to 15 separate rooms is that this is of course limited to the amount of tuners in the original device, which is two, and to the number of active DTCP sessions it can cope with, also two. So at any given time this set up can only record two programs, while two separate rooms watch recorded programs. Sure it can select these TVs from a list of 15 TVs in the home, but it cannot support that number concurrently. It’s not enough and it’s not the leading technology in this market and within a few months of launch disaffected customers may well be saying so, and quite loudly on Facebook accounts.
You have to look to Pace, which back in October last year launched its own version, called the Home Content Sharing system. The DirecTV box looks like a poor imitation, because the Pace box will support 9 concurrent TV sessions not two, can record 6 programs at once, and comes integrated with Rovi’s EPG. Of course DirecTV might actually be using the Pace device, but why would they disable the capability for extra channels, so we think not.
Pace claimed at the time that its multiroom DVR was the first in the market, and it uses a home NAS (Network Attached Storage) device held centrally, rather than a central DVR inside a set top. It already has an agreement that the National Cable TV Cooperative to offer the device to its membership, but it has no major takers from the big pay TV operators as yet. Well with DirecTV crowing over a diluted form of the same device, and given that Pace devices on average are cheaper than the US suppliers, we would expect this product segment to come alive in a big way before the year is out and for Pace to be a major beneficiary.
Pace used MoCA for connectivity too and supports an eSATA port for easy expansion of more disk ‘ similar to the DirecTV device.
Whatever the case, this is bad news for any set top company that cannot do this multiroom trick. All the top end consumers will go that way in their next generation, and the actual set top burden on an operator (and its customers) will fall, not rise. DirecTV is offering this new multiroom DVR for only $3 a month more (okay you have to pay more for a HD DVR to begin with and for DVR service etc’) showing that the cost of the digital media adaptors is very low. In fact retrofitting it into its existing HD DVR is a master stroke, meaning it can get the capability out there for not very much money at all.
IMS Research said earlier this year that this cheap DMA technology would replace 32 million set-tops by the end of 2015 and that sounds about right, perhaps half of all gross additions in pay TV across the US during that time.
IMS also highlighted Samsung as taking a lead in adding DMAs which support DLNA, DTCP, and a remote UI standard such as RVU or CEA-2014 (of which DirecTV is only a member, not a founder). and putting these into its TV sets directly. So in the long run these DMAs get absorbed into the TV design and come down to a few dollars and a few chips, which disappear into the declining price of LCD TVs.
What we are left with is a land grab for the whole home DVR, controlled somewhat by operator choices at first, but later, as each of them offer a wider variety of Whole Home devices, selected by consumers, based on best of breed and price.