On the surface the Broadcom deal with Iliad’s Free operator in France is just yet another design win for a set top chip that was the first to offer 4K. But at a stroke Broadcom could have regained most of the French market back from Intel, by getting the biggest quad play disruptor in the market to opt for Broadcom based 4K. Others may follow.
It is true that Intel at present has no specialist 4K chip in the set top market and has aimed most of its 4K work at the ability to cope with 4K files on a PC and to deliver it over WiDi to a TV screen. So it was always going to lose the set top business that it had built up with its CE4100 and subsequent CE5300 range of specialist video chips.
But France has been where many of those original design wins were, and all of the IPTV operators there – beginning with Free in 2009, then followed by a procession of Orange with its Intel based Livebox; Bouygues Telecom with its BBox and SFR with its Neufbox, who all chose Intel, slowly replacing something close to 30 million devices in the process.
It was only because this neighboring country had opted for Intel “en masse” that Liberty Global in the Netherlands went with an Intel chip. It too will have to look beyond Intel for a 4K replacement for its next gen horizon box (if it ever designs one).
Marvel was the first swap out, a few months ago taking the SFR contract with its Armada 1500 Plus SoC running Google TV, and is now on offer to over 4 million French customers.
That was a surprise that the contract went to Marvell, although perhaps this was on the back of its Chromecast design win.
The new Broadcom win at Free, like the Marvell win, is also to offer UHD on an Android TV set top design, and will use the Broadcom’s BCM7252 SoC fresh from design wins at Telefonica last August and Tata Sky in India and Sky Broadband in Korea in September.
Free’s set-top will also leverage the Broadcom’s BCM43570 for Bluetooth remote control and a 2×2 802.11ac WiFi chip for wireless streaming and will run Android Apps. It will run 4Kp60 10-bit HEVC content. The BCM7252 offers 10.5 DMIPS across a two-core CPU. Of course making the set top capable of 4K does not mean that 4K services are imminent – operators will want them widely installed before taking that step.
You can bet that Free will be using the Broadcom WiFi for Homespot WiFi, because almost all Free quad play devices offer Homespots (a second commercial SSID from the Home gateway) and Free virtually invented this idea.