Broadcom has come out of its US centric shell and finally launched a series of chips to support ISDB-T, the Japanese digital TV technology which is being installed right across Latin America.
We did talk a few weeks ago about the exploding economy in Latin America when DirecTV sold 4 times more pay TV subscribers there than in the US in the previous quarter, pointing out that TV sales there had the potential to dwarf US sales, and predicted that every manufacturer of set tops, VoD servers and encoders would descend on Brazil.
Brazil has harsh import duties which make it a natural manufacturing center for the region, to avoid or offset those duties.
Broadcom didn’t launch a single chip so much as a broadside on the entire ISDB-T industry, supporting it with chips for set tops as well as HD converters, and incorporating a tuner into the chips, instead of buying in a third party tuner chip, which it says is global first. The company also added its own software layer and said that its new FastRTV channel change acceleration technology will also be included. FastRTV, says Broadcom, improves channel change speeds by up to 5 times though it hasn’t really explained how. The channel change technology was launched separately in the same week, targeting US cable operators who are finally leaving behind analog delivery of local broadcast channels and replacing them with an entirely new digital system.
Broadcom said its chips will support the TQTVD AstroTV platform, an interactive middleware platform which has a 50% market share in Brazil and around a 32% share in Latin America which Broadcom feels is set to become a standard for interactivity for the region on ISDB-T devices.
The product family will include the Broadcom BCM 7405 set-top box SoC and the BCM 7540 ISDB-T HD digital terrestrial converter box SoC and both will be demonstrated at the upcoming Broadcast & Cable 2010 show in S’o Paulo.
Broadcom has designs for the older MPEG2 version of ISDB-T which runs in Japan, but as far as we know has no significant wins there, so this will be its first real opportunity to shift volumes in this technology. Ironically US chip design minnow MaxLinear has the dominant share of ISDB-T in Japan, with a chip which was taken on board by most of the Japanese set top makers. MaxLinear will be hoping for a large piece of the Latin American market, and all the Japanese majors such as Panasonic, Murata and MTC, which MaxLinear supplies with chips for Japan, are likely to set up in Brazil as well. Most Chinese and Taiwanese set top firms are also considering setting up there, and already have designs on the market, so Broadcom may have come late to the party, hence the addition of interactivity as an extra incentive.
We have often criticized Broadcom for missing out on opportunities for RF based technologies such as ATSC M/H and China’s CMMB, but we understand that it tends to enter such markets when the demand is proven, and those markets were unproven for large volumes. The company has a reputation for driving down cost in any given chip genre and has a leadership position in DSL, Set top, DVD, WiFi and Bluetooth technologies. It has acquired an ATSC chip design company, but used it purely to benefit from the digitization of US analog TV, and has not backed the ATSC M/H mobile TV market as yet.
After Brazil triggered the selection of ISDB-T a full four years ago, Venezuela finally created the continental drift toward the Japanese standard when it rejected DVB-T after 2 full years of trial and opted for ISDB-T. By then Brazil had got over its early misgivings and had deployed the technology at 26 cities. More have since been added.
Peru followed suit later after conducting trials with ATSC, DVB-T and ISDB-T and less than a year ago Argentina, Chile and Ecuador confirmed the move with countries like Columbia due to join them. There are more than 300 million people in all those territories added to the 127 million in Japan, making ISDB-T one of the most far reaching digital TV standards.
Broadcom said its new chips feature the industry’s first and only integrated ISDB-T tuner, digital channel demodulator and HD decoder. We’re sure its not in a lower enough power level to run in 1 Seg mobile TV, which operates as part of ISDB-T, but perhaps the chips can be used in slightly less portable devices such as tablet computers, as far as we can see Broadcom has not yet publicly released power requirements for the new chips. It does say that the device has a dynamic power management controller, but that only means it can go from exceptionally low power standby to full power in a couple of seconds.
Brazil has 190 million people and will be shutting down its analog TV broadcasts in 2016 by which time all TV sets will need to include ISDB-T or go dark. The rest of Latin America is substantially behind that schedule.
By supporting AstroTV, Broadcom says that it will enable interactive services such as shopping, voting, viewing statistics, education and public announcements. Broadcom also pointed out that 95% of homes in Brazil have a TV but only 23% have a broadband line so many homes have little or no access to information online or to public service announcements, hence the need for interactivity on the TV set. The two chips are already shipping to manufacturers says Broadcom.