While we mentioned it last week in a brief IBC roundup, it is worth coming back to Swiss set top maker ADB and its strategic approach to a market that is clearly in transition from dominant cable and satellite to hybrid TV services.
There were two things on the ADB stand and agenda at IBC, and in a way they were instances of the same idea, sharing TV streams around the home – it’s Scalable Virtual Gateway concept and the idea of secure DLNA clients on portable devices. The scaleable gateway is made up with a series of software changes to existing set tops, which allow for any tuner from multiple set tops to be harnessed to resolve and decrypt a TV channel and show it on any other part of the network.
They can be sent from set top to set top, and from set top to portable devices, which ADB took to mean an Apple iPad, and which it achieved by writing a DTCP-IP client (a DLNA approved protocol) on the iPad using Apple’s SDK. All Hybrid services are integrated at the UI level using ADB’s Carbo UI system and streaming is being focused on HTML 5.0 streams.
But this secure client surprised a lot of people at the show, partly because although the DLNA 1.5 guidelines were set in 2006 and updated to include portable devices in October 2006 ‘no-one has yet implemented a secure portable client that anyone has talked about openly before. Even DLNA had not heard of anyone doing it and certainly hasn’t certified one. We think this is more due to the slow initial adoption rate of DLNA, which has now accelerated to take over 8,000 devices around the world. It wasn’t worth creating a DLNA secure client before ‘ soon it will be essential.
The process is to decrypt video a frame at a time using the conditional access software used by a pay TV operator. Frame by frame this is re-encrypted using a session key for the DLNA secure DTCP-IP client and streamed to the portable device. Effectively this is a way around having interoperable DRMs and is the DLNA’s attempt at releasing content from the stringent control of a CA.
We think that ADB’s largest IPTV client, Telefonica uses the Nagravision conditional access, and it would be a fair guess this is how this was implemented, because it would make this two Swiss companies working together, which makes sense. We have yet to find out if a broad list of CA vendors would allow this technique, although if an operator requested it, we’re not sure how they could fail to go along.
Let’s be clear, this is a very different experience from all the iPad TV experiences that we have seen so far. Mostly these have been progressive download and streaming services which have to find their way over the internet, or worse still a 3G network, to your iPad. They require a separate log on, search and selection and viewing and are more error prone and less integrated with a pay TV experience. On the other hand DLNA has yet to certify any kind of protection which will satisfy Hollywood, which can allow portable devices to keep these DLNA protected link streams, whereas content downloaded over the internet can usually be stored on a portable device.
ADB told us the secure DLNA client can be reached by either Ethernet, over MoCA cabling or over WiFi, but it was definitely demonstrated over the air to the iPad. There is be set top to set top DLNA communication going on as well within the Scalable Virtual Gateway. If you use the tuner on one device to pick out a TV channel, you might be sending it to a dumb set top that doesn’t have decryption capabilities, so it would need to be DTCP-IP stream protected, not still encrypted with the CA system. If you are sending it to a fully configured device it can tune or decrypt it or both, when it gets there.
ADB is also a member of HPNA so probably wouldn’t be fussed about whether these streams are sent over MoCA or HPNA, but there is only a secure stream defined for MoCA at this point by the DLNA as far as we know, though an HPNA connection is sure to be coming.
ADB is perhaps best known for building its first hybrid set top back in 2005, which was a DVB-T/IP hybrid in for Telefonica’s Imagenio service in Spain. Today it reckons that 75% of its revenue comes from a set top that is a hybrid. Well technically that was the ratio in 2009. In the first half of this year ADB hybrids only made up 62% of revenues. In fact the first half year shows a mixed bag all round for ADB. Revenues fell from $183 million for the half year in 2009 to $141 million in 2010. The biggest drop are in the number of cable devices shipped, with cable suddenly making up 29% of sales in the first half from 39% last year. IPTV has jumped from 19% of revenue to 27% while satellite has crept up.
Paul Bristow, VP strategy, middleware and consumer experience at ADB told us, ‘We have seen over the top free to air services in Europe already. But they all come with separate players, in the UK you have the BBC iPlayer and then you have to log out of that and log into the ITV player or another player for your next catch up TV service. But pay TV operators can take that and bring it all together and provide a single unified interface, so this is where the next round of hybrid service creation is going to be.’
ADB last month demonstrated that premium DVR content sharing between tru2way set-tops and DLNA certified devices at CableLabs interop, presumably using the same DLNA type of clients, which suggests that there might soon be a similar opening up in the US of set tops streaming to portable devices.