Echostar has adapted the HD DVR that it first showed as a DTH set top for its own US Dish network in the US in January, and will bring it to Europe as an IPTV device this year, showing it off for the first time at IPTV World Forum in London this week.
EchoStar will launch the device with its integrated SlingLoaded home networking and place-shifting technology, as the HDX series, with the 600 a fully fledged DVR and the 400 with no hard drive, but room to put in your own.
This is the first EchoStar product offered to the IPTV community, although it stepped out of its satellite TV comfort zone last year to offer a Cable Modem which has Sling function built in.
Placeshifting and Sling have both come a long way since the company was taken over by EchoStar in September 2007, for $380 million, and the company has added the ability to sling video not just remotely over broadband, but also around the home, as well as filing for patents which insert advertising into the slung stream.
Really this has been a transition from consumers buying the service to operators buying into it, and a number of European cellular operators have already brought out phones which have the mobile Sling client factory installed. It has also seen the addition of new advertising revenues, where advertising is inserted into the broadband stream when it arrives at the far end of a remote session, and with some of that being place addressable, in that it can be selected as relevant to where you are (not just who you are or what you are watching). Another development in broadband has been the retailing of broadband lines, or switching of broadband supply from a third party to the incumbent, built in to the request to use placeshifting from a set top ‘ in short it’s also a marketing opportunity.
So while Placeshifting used to rely on taking content out of the analog hole and re-digitizing it, and then password protecting the stream, now operators can choose to take the DRMed stream and place the DRM keys in the PC or handset clients ‘ at least that’s what’s implied by the announcement which says that it will integrate with all existing DRMs, although we’ll be checking up on that later. We imagine it just means that it works with Nagravision, which is the system that Dish Networks uses in partnership with the European CA vendor. Both of the new products support H.264, or what it refers to as AVC (MPEG 4 Part 10 AVC) for HD encoded programming,
We imagine that in Europe, where TiVo has no presence, EchoSDtar will not come up against customer resistance over the idea that it may get sued by TiVo for copying its patents in designing a DVR. We suspect TiVo still has not done with EchoStar, from which it won over $100 million in patent litigation, and still believes that the workaround which EchoStar has used to continue building DVRs without paying a further royalty, relies on technology which TiVo owns.
‘IPTV is still a major growth sector in digital entertainment and as such presents us with great opportunities to bring our added-value solutions and technologies to market’, commented Rick Smith, Vice President Sales and Marketing at EchoStar Europe. ‘With new technologies such as SlingLoaded and EchoStar Europe’s unique content navigation systems, you begin to see how IPTV operators can add real value at the product level and seriously differentiate themselves.’
The product first came to light in January as the ViP922, at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show where it won an award, and showed it could cope with 1080p VoD streams. The ViP922 will start being delivered in the US about now. It was the first of the EchoStar products to use a touchpad remote control to eliminate many of the buttons on a standard remote control.