When people ask us at Faultline what the future of the set top is, it’s not surprising that we can never predict – every tier 1 pay TV major seems to have a very different view about which direction they are going in. Take this week Orange’s new LiveBox, presumably to be launched as the LiveBox 3 or LiveBox 4K. In France all set tops tend to be Home Gateways and VoIP boxes too, and this is no different.
In some respects, Orange has gone the same route that Liberty Global and Sky have gone – let’s put more of everything into the device, and there is only the vaguest tip of the hat to the cloud. The new Livebox not only copes with 4K video, but with HDR, and it takes Orange back to the Broadcom chipset family.
Two years ago Intel had virtually a clean sweep of the 30 million French set top market, but given that it has dropped out of the race which lacks support for 4K in its CE range of chips, someone had to fill the hole – at Iliad’s Free a year ago it was Broadcom once again also supporting 4K, but two months earlier it had been SFR’s turn to jump from Intel to the Marvel Armada 1500 Plus SoC. The deal at Free was to the Broadcom BCM 7252 and both of these supported Android. The Broadcom BCM7252 SoC also has design wins at Telefonica, Tata Sky in India and Sky Broadband in Korea.
Orange has not chosen to go Android, but has its own software in the box as yet undefined, but likely to owe something to the SoftAtHome code, which it has some control over, we suspect. Although as we remember it SoftAtHome software can look a lot like Android, and use apps from Play, but without looking like Android or having to use other Google Apps.
Like Free, the Orange Livebox set top has 802.11ac WiFi, but there the similarities begin to evaporate – there are two chips for dual mode WiFi in the Livebox not one, in both 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz, just as there was that the Sky Q, although as yet there is no mention of whether or not this uses the same meshing software. The Sky Q uses a dual mode mesh, part WiFi, with a fall back to powerline, but it also uses both WiFi bands. We think that Orange feels that reliability of broadband signal can be provided a different way – and it has doubled up on the boxes in the home, adding an LTE AirBox (LTE to WiFi router) to offer customers a cellular broadband backup solution.
Free used a 2 x 2 MIMO 802.11ac only and its SoC processing power was a full 10,000 DMIPS. Orange has unleashed the BCM63138, an SoC with just 5000 DMIPS of power, but with G.Fast components bundled onto it which facilitates connections to G.Fast and VDSL lines. We’re not sure if this means some application power comes from another chip, because Orange boasts that this is 3 times more powerful than its predecessor. That will become important because it has plans for bundling some console class games on its service.
Back in November SFR partnered with Swiss TV technology firm Nagra (It now owns EchoStar Europe) to launch a 4K Ultra HD service and set top in France which was pure OTT using Nagra’s anyCAST content security as well as its MediaLive multiscreen technology. None of these other French systems mentioned HDR, but Orange insists that its set top will be HDR ready although perhaps this is really just processing power to add the extra workload and data for HDR and it can be retrofitted to other devices.
Europe’s ST Micro exited the global set top market in January so it’s no surprise that Broadcom has taken most of France back from Intel, with the exception of one deal to Marvell.
There was no launch date for the new Livebox, but it was promised to carry some of the 4K games in this year’s Euro 2016 soccer tournament, so expect it by no later than June. Other 4K content was promised from Netflix. Livebox will be able to work with High Dynamic Range (HDR) images as long as you have a TV that can show them, which may not be until later this year. It also uses Dolby Atmos for sound.
Despite the lack of power in the Broadcom chip Orange has included a wireless games controller and it said that 200 games will be playable for free, with some shown in 4K video, at launch – but it gave no more details.
The nod to the cloud in the design is that it has both a DVR drive (1TB of storage) and a cloud DVR as well, rather like Swisscom. It makes no sense to provide cloud space and still pay for a huge disk drive in the device, and we suspect this will only appear in first generation devices, and slowly disk drives will disappear in such devices, as the cloud DVR becomes accepted and reliable.
One interesting line in the announcement is that Orange says the 1 TB drive can be shared with up to 10 people – this either means that you can copy content from the home DVR to up to 10 different portable devices, or that it will transcode and stream to this many devices. We think the former is more likely.
Orange also features one of those new, stripped down remote controls or the device can be controlled through an app on a phone, tablet or watch and that App has built into it the Nuance supplied voice controls, so that you can speak to the device to change channel or search. Presumably the existing Voyage multiscreen and recommendation engine from subsidiary Viaccess Orca is built into these apps or will be at some point, since they have led the Orange incursion into multiscreen over the past two years.
During the launch event a virtual reality immersive event was conducted using the HTC Vive VR headset to take journalists and executives into the box itself.
Also at the launch the Livebox was shown incorporating a few other specialist apps such as celebrity recognition app Reminiz, which recognizes actors on screen to bring up actor details, and Wildmoka, which is already used by Canal+ in France. Wildmoka lets you share 30 second clips from TV on social media. The launch event was held at the 4th “Show Hello” at the Carrousel du Louvre, in Paris.
Orange also used the event offer up its Homelive services: telemonitoring by EPS; Wiser multizone thermostat control from Schneider Electric; control of energy bills with EDF’s e.quilibre service; and to announced new development partners in Awox, Cabasse, Fitbit, Garmin, Netatmo, Parrot Flower Power, Philips Hue, Somfy, Sony Lifelog and Withings.