There is more news on that Motorola tablet this week, partly broken by the Financial Times newspaper in London, and the most important addition is that it will be launched through Verizon with its FiOS IPTV network.
The more we think about a tablet for the TV, the more we think that it could become something truly ‘home’ changing. Motorola first showed a tablet format at CES in January, but it was more of a concept device. It was talked about at a price point of $300 had a 7 inch screen and ran Android and had Nvidia graphics.
Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha has consistently talked about ‘tablets’ in the plural and with his thorough approach, and when you see what he has done in the handset market with Android, we suspect this is an entire genre of products.
What would we expect such devices to do? Well for Motorola the holy grail has to be DLNA. This stands for the Digital Living Network Alliance and is a 6 year old, highly labored industry grouping, begun by 18 of the largest constituents in the digital home, the promoter members have now swelled to 26, from chip makers to content producers to consumer electronics companies to pay TV operators, and it has long established use cases for how content can move around a home.
Those use cases are quite advanced and consumers are only now just beginning to see the fruits of fairly boring, but necessary standard endorsing work and plug fests which are the staple diet of this organization. In May Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson all obtained DLNA certification for some of their devices, though curiously this has hardly made it into the news pages at all ‘ probably because those devices are mostly not launched.
Just last week the Alliance said that the number of DLNA certified Blu-ray players had nearly doubled to 105. And before phones, or tablets, can interact with TVs in the home, the core devices ‘ Blu-ray players, TV sets and DVRs, have to make that leap themselves.
DLNA is all about accessing any content, mostly unprotected content, on any device in the home. We say mostly unprotected, because DRM has never really been got to grips with by the DLNA and it has no strategy on interoperable DRM.
So until now it has been more interested in defining format types for say printers from mobile devices or defining device classes, or adding support for H.264 video. But there are two ways it can deal with protected content The first is if a content operator also offers a second device and supplies transparent DRM – this is something that Verizon could easily do, offering DRM keys to portable devices from FiOS, such as to this proposed Motorola tablet. The other approach and one we see very clearly on the roadmap of DLNA, is the idea of supporting streaming protocols such as RTP and offering link protection. That way streaming protection such as DCTP can prevent some level of piracy when the content is on the way to another device, and content can simply be streamed to a second device, with no copy being kept.
What DLNA makes possible is the ability to locate content anywhere in the DLNA universe in your home, so on a DVR, a camera, a PC, phone or home server, and shift it to be streamed on ANY of the other devices. This can also work with music and photos.
DLNA breaks all the devices into storage, controllers and rendering devices and makes them plug and play together. So you can watch a TV program on TV, decide to switch it to another portable device, and send the sound to the speakers on your laptop. What the DLNA had to deal with early on was the issue of control and giving control power to other devices. In this way your TV remote can increase the volume on the bedroom TV, where you just sent the rest of your TV program.
In the DLNA world you can leave your camera plugged into your laptop and still watch what’s on its hard drive in the living room. Previously only direct connections would work and they had to have the same plugs.
Back in 2003 when this group was formed, it was known as the Digital Home Working Group, but when Nokia joined it changed its name to the DLNA because it was about digital living, which included things outside the home ‘ specifically phones and now potentially tablets.
But the applications that seem most interesting on a video tablet are mostly IN the home we reckon, especially in this ‘streamed’ video world rather than one which relies on storing new copies of video files.
So what could a video tablet do? It could flip to the EPG of a pay TV service, and then select a channel. It might send the program on that channel to a DVR or just pause it while you go upstairs to another room, and then let you trigger play. You might use the tablet to look up something on the internet, while watching another channel. It might deliver the sound to the channel you’re watching to your earbuds, or to your laptop, which has a better set of earbuds. It might let you control your Blu-ray player, and stream the video to your tablet, notebook or a TV.
All of that you get from DLNA certification. So that’s pretty much without re-inventing anything, just putting tried and tested control features and tried and tested stream and file types, on a new device. Every one of Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson have already proved to the DLNA that they have code which can do all that, so it just needs porting to a new device, which will no doubt run Android, the same operating system that Motorola will have probably first delivered it on.
It’s the other features of the Motorola tablet device which are hardest to design. Well for sure it will play Android Market apps, so that’s games, streaming video services over wi-fi in your home and at work as well as some VoIP style voice capabilities. Already this device is sounding cool to take out of your home, despite its core function being one which is attached to your pay TV operator.
If you add a TV Everywhere service from FiOS, so that its pay TV programming can be viewed anywhere over the internet for paying subscribers, including on this tablet, then it is a pretty perfect device and probably capable of offering a better video serviced than Apple and iTunes. If that happens Motorola will suddenly have improved leverage in the set top world and also have a new product to ship to all of its existing IPTV operators. It might even be able to make it work with cable boxes too, though that’s a different set of problems.
We have for some time talked about iTunes TV and Apple’s desire to offer TV channels on a monthly pay basis, to rival cable and other pay TV operations. Because it has not yet emerged, and potentially this is because Apple cannot get the kinds of content licenses that it needs, it may well put both Apple, as well as Google TV, at a huge disadvantage in home tablets. Tablets without content are just heavy Gameboys or MIDs.
But we know that Verizon and FiOS has content galore if Motorola first targets the digital home at Verizon with tablet number one, and then frees up other tablets to work outside the home with cellular services, it could mount a viable challenge to the iPad outside of the AT&T cellular customer base, which is about two thirds of the US. Of course people can buy an iPad without an AT&T data contract, either cellular or Wi-Fi, but the number that prefer to be sure that their data is paid for, before they start using a tablet is likely to be a lot higher than those who have their own Wi-Fi service.
The first Motorola tablet will be out during 2010, which is likely to make it one of the first that support Adobe Flash, and it will be thinner and lighter than the iPad, and offer two cameras, one to take pics and the other for video conferencing. All in all if Motorola has the same kind of success or better than it had with the Droid and Droid X, then it will seriously be in the tablet game through America’s second largest telco.