The world loves a trier and Israeli’s Amimon is certainly not about to give up its bid to be the de facto video chip player in wireless HD devices around the home, and has just won another $15 million to push its WHDI chip sets.
When we were at IP&TV World Forum this week people asked about WHDI and it’s easy to get confused between this and 5 or 6 other players who are pushing the envelope on wireless connection of HD video signals. WHDI uses the same unlicensed 5GHz spectrum which has been released for WiFi in most countries, whereas SiBEAM and WirelessHD uses 60GHz spectrum and competes head on with WiGig, and in fact SiBEAM, has created a chip which offers both WirelessHD and WiGig in one.
Our money is on pure WiFi and talking to Celeno and Airties at the show, it’s what works today. The tough decisions ahead are which platform to use as a backbone for an increasingly besieged home network. As Tablets proliferate and WiFi signals are needed crystal clear in the living room, and need to be HD capable, the looming 802.11ac standard looks favorite, and companies like Quantenna, Celeno and Airties can all hop to that standard more or less unchanged.
The fight for a home backbone may be between coaxial cable, twisted pair and power cables, and there may be a different winner on each continent, but we can’t help think they are playing for a smaller piece of the pie, once wireless signals within a room become resolved for carrying HD. At the show, pure 1901 powerline looks like it is claiming 500 Mbps, G.hn is only admitting to 300 Mbps usable on its wireline portion (1 Gbps over the rest of its architecture) and that leaves the door ajar for the preferred MoCA connectivity used for multi-room DVRs in the US to take the bandwidth high ground in a bid for the home backbone, but not actual device connectivity, at least not in Europe where there is so little coax.
But as 5 GHz signals are unlicensed and clear for use, that seems a place we can see for the near future wireless standard and using 20MHz WiFi channels, or bonding them to 40 MHz channels or including smart MIMO antenna and using channel hopping to ensure the best channel is used for a signal all the time, are all common techniques for everyone ‘ the difference is that if your technology can ONLY be used on your chips, then every home still needs to have WiFi in there somewhere. We think 60 GHz is a science project at the moment and success for it is down the line somewhat, if ever.
And that’s the problem that Amimon seems to have. It says that it is going to use this new $15 million to create follow-on generations its WHDI chipset, and that these will be used to offer wireless HDTV and PC-to-TV and mobile and tablet-to-TV connections. Amimon said that numerous companies are developing products (wireless HDTVs, PC-to-TV, tablet-to-TV, HD Wireless Bridges) based on WHDI chipsets.
Hold on just a second, how does that work? Tablets come with WiFi, they do not come with chips that can peek into WiFi spectrum, but use different protocols. So either this is WiFi or it is not. If it IS WiFi then why doesn’t it say so. If it isn’t then it can’t talk to Tablets unless a home buys extra equipment.
Here’s what Amimon says about it, ‘WHDI utilizes a 40MHz channel in the 5GHz unlicensed band and can be implemented with a single antenna for minimal footprint.’ And our take is that using a single antenna WiFi would not yield the performance it boasts, so this is a different encoding, plain and simple. It’s not WiFi.
So not only is it going to be challenging to beat off WiFi players in the same spectrum, especially those like Celeno, which makes a case that it can beamform to existing single antenna WiFi devices, but then there is this idea of Tablet to TV connectivity. First off, if both devices have WiFi it’s not a problem. But if you want more than control commands, and you want to say, stream commercial programming from a pay TV environment, then you have to deal with the encryption issues and they are fairly impenetrable right now.
Yes it is feasible to take content and decode it with a conditional access system, and then recode it with another encryption system for devices which have no hardware security. The options here are to encode to the DLNA embraced standard which is DTCP-IP. Hollywood has dictated that this cannot be in a software only configuration and needs hardware support and we don’t seen any of the major Tablet makers, certainly not Apple, and probably not Samsung, adding extra security hardware for one pay TV operator. With OTT catch up services for broadcasters which deliver free to air, the signal mostly comes over the internet and can stream to a WiFi box anyway. So you don’t need anything clever.
Operations like YouView can select their own encryption, and it has chosen the Marlin DRM from Intertrust, and that can be embedded on a tablet in an application. The same for any TV Everywhere solution from a pay TV provider because it comes from the internet over WiFi. Google now has Widevine to enable this, Motorola has Secure Media, and all the other DRM players ‘ Verimatrix and Irdeto in particular, have published software only, tablet capable implementations.
But this ALL presupposes that the connection is between the home gateway and the tablet, NOT between the TV and the tablet. Yes, Sony could come out with its own Tablet-TV combination, so might Samsung, all with specialist hardware, and they might incorporate chips like the WHDI chips ‘ except that Sony has already ditched the WHDI chip set and embraced (the equally unlikely) WirelessHD.
We would have loved to have had a chance to critique the business plan before this $15 million was handed over, and will be happy to be proven wrong, but cannot see just how any of the planned Wireless connections to TV sets, will manage to avoid being WiFi.
Amimon last raised money in July 2009 when it snapped up $10 million in a fourth round of funding, led by Stata Venture Partners. So we can expect $15 million to last around 18 months unless its burn rate does not go down and it gets closer to profitability.