Freshly public US TV chip maker Maxlinear has landed a plum contract with French set top maker Netgem, which demonstrates how valuable its silicon TV tuners may turn out to be. So far the US company has relied largely upon revenues from its mobile TV chip line, where in Japan it has a 70% market share in ISDB-T mobile 1-seg devices.
MaxLinear went public on the back of investor interest in the fact that ISDB-T is now being lined up as the primary mobile TV technology for most of South America as well. However it has always tried to tell analysts that it is replacement of ‘CAN’ tuners in all forms of tuned TV services which will make its fortune.
The Netgem deal must have been known about for some time, because it will ship the tuners in a number of devices, among them the Telstra commissioned DVB-T/Web TV hybrid, and Netgem won that contract back in November, although was initially only shipping devices in Melbourne on a trial basis. Given that this set top will be sold at retail, there is the potential for millions of devices to be sold in Australia.
The two companies said further that they would use the MxL201RF chip in set tops destined for terrestrial, cable and IPTV collaborations throughout Europe
We’re not quite sure just how you use a tuner in an IPTV set top, although increasingly IPTV set tops are also hybrids with either web (or internet) TV or with digital terrestrial in Europe, which is perhaps where the chip is used, to tune DVB-T.
The fact that Netgem will also sell the chip in set tops for Australia, almost certainly means that it is part of the Telstra T-Box a DVB-T/Web TV hybrid which will access BigPond TV over the internet and terrestrial free-to-air high definition TV channels. Netgem started out as an IPTV set top company and is renowned for landing the SFR owned Neuf Cegetel IPTV contract in France for set tops. Other Netgem’s customers include Monaco Telecom, Elisa in Finland, Spec-Com in Algeria, Melita Telecom and FetchTV in the UK, but SFR and Telstra are the biggies.
A week or so ago Netgem said sales were up 6% year on year, but that was with an 11% decline in its native France, while international sales jumped to €12.3 million at the half year stage and had only been €1.3 million at this stage last year. Revenues were €62 million in France and €74.3 million over all. If that’s a taste of things to come, it may mean that MaxLinear is in for a huge ride on one of Europe’s bigger set top builders.
The MaxLinear tuner measures just 5mm by 5mm and uses its proprietary digital CMOS technology. The company claims that it has integrated channel filtering and on the chip it achieves a 94dB gain, so it works well in weak signal areas.
The chip only uses 400mW of power, meaning a four-tuner system can be built with the power budget of just one device using old CAN technology. CAN tuners are coil based and have to be set up for a single type of TV signal, silicon tuners are far smaller, take less power and can be set to work with all the world’s TV standards in one package.
MaxLinear says its tuner can be implemented on simple two-layer circuit boards and do not require any heat dissipation, saving more costs associated with fans, shields and heat sinks.
MaxLinear is by no means that only company chasing this market, but since going public, it has proven to have a much higher profile than most of its direct rivals.