Turkish IPTV set top company AirTies was showing a couple of innovations at the IBC show that many of its larger cousins would love to be able to boast about, making it one of the more interesting Turkish technology exporters around.
On show was an 802.11n wireless HD set top box built around Broadcom based wi-fi system on a chip. No customers were announced for it at the show but the Air 7124 comes with built-in 2x2MIMO connectivity and one touch TV to router set up. Only Ruckus Wireless has been offering this type of capability in Europe complete with MIMO, buffering and packet resend, to cope with the fact that traditional Wi-Fi loses too many packets for video.
Airties also landed a deal with Dutch service provider Caiway to use a non-wireless version of the same product, the AirTies Air 7120 which will carry 350 TV and radio channels. This has the other neat innovation, which is a chunk of about 2 GB of NAND Flash to enable the ability to pause-live TV without a DVR and for a fraction of the cost. Operators can then provide basic DVR this way, and only subsidize a full hard drive DVR for customers who will pay more. There is less energy consumption, noise and heat, and the access is faster than a hard drive, the company says.
We don’t know what happened to them but about two years ago there was a ‘pause TV’ specification for TV sets, which somehow never materialized.
Already Airties has installed 20,000 IPTV set tops in its native Turkey and is now trying to move out to the rest of Europe and the US.
‘There are lots of tools within 802.11n to fine tune Wi-Fi for video if you know that you are doing,’ a spokesman said, ‘There are different formulas for different bit rates and back off parameters and you can create one internal queue for video packets and another for everything else.’
Even the non-wireless Air 7120 can be set up to acquire wireless with the addition of an external USB dongle says Airties.
AirTies CEO B’lent ‘elebi said: ‘Caiway has successfully offered the internet via cable since 1995, with more than 75,000 subscriptions to date, and was the first in Europe to do so. The fact it has selected AirTies to deliver its second wave of internet technology is testament to the hard work and commitment the team has put in to delivering the most cutting-edge technology.’
The company also announced an integration agreement with Danish middleware provider Nordija for the HD Air 7120 IP set-top.