Videonet - news, blogs and analysis for the pay-tv industry

• 10-Jun-2010 by John Moulding
• HD DVR driving whole home TV
• Connected Home

DirectTV's HD PVR

A key priority for a growing number of Pay TV operators is to enable their subscribers to enjoy HDTV and DVR functionality on all the televisions in the home. Clearly as consumers get used to DVR on the main living room television they will increasingly want time-shift capabilities in all rooms and as widescreen TVs proliferate in homes, the difference between HD and standard-definition broadcasts will become more obvious.

Increasing competition from over-the-top content providers on the PC and via connected TV devices (e.g. Blu-ray players, games consoles and televisions) also means they have to work harder to cement their position as primary entertainment aggregator at home. What better way to do that than to give consumers the best of their services in all rooms and not just in the living room?

The problem is delivering these whole home TV experiences cost-effectively and that has been driving the interest in architectures that combine a media gateway server with multiple thin client devices, some of which may be bought by the consumer themselves in retail.

There has therefore been a big emphasis on DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) this year. As Stephen Palm, Technical Director, Broadband Communications Group at Broadcom, one of the system-on-chip vendors helping to drive the connected home, points out: “Service providers have an interest in trying to utilise the hardware that people might already have in the home. This can help them save on CAPEX, so we are seeing a lot more interest in operators for using DLNA.”

The DLNA Interoperability Guidelines are creating a wide choice of compatible devices that can be networked together and one of the key applications is media sharing. Palm points out that two years ago there were 50 DLNA certified devices and in the first quarter of 2010 the figure was just over 1,700, which demonstrates the momentum behind this initiative.

Broadcom has been demonstrating this year that DLNA is not simply about moving personal content around a home network but is very much a solution for delivering premium Pay TV operator video throughout a home. And MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) is a big part of that solution for many operators and maybe not just in the US given that an IMS Research survey showed that well over half of UK and French respondents had two or more coax outlets at home.

Although agnostic to home networking physical layers, Broadcom is a big supporter of MoCA and the combination of DLNA and MoCA has been an important theme of its demonstrations in 2010. The company’s BCM7408 client HD set-top box SoC solution was one of the big product announcements at CES in January. When paired with a media server or IP gateway solution enabled by Broadcom technology this enables support of whole-home connected entertainment services such as multi-room HD DVR.

MoCA is already playing an important role in whole home HD DVR deployments this year. US cable operator Cox Communications is using this home networking solution for its multiroom services. US satellite operator DIRECTV is launching its own multi-room DVR service including HD multi-room in 2010 as well, using MoCA.

Multiroom DVR is probably the first step towards a home media architecture where a primary server device distributes content to thin clients around the home. DLNA and its accompanying transmission link copy protection standard, DTCP-IP are important enablers for this.

One of the problems operators have to confront if they start serving their content to (second and third) televisions without set-top boxes is how to display their programme guide and user interface, and so create a consistent branded look-and-feel around the home.

This is the problem the RVU Alliance was created to solve. This consortium of service provider, semiconductor and CE companies promotes the use and interoperability of Remote User Interface (RUI) technology, which effectively makes the media server do all the hard work in generating the user interface ‘look’ at any given time while leaving the thin clients to simply display the results.

The RVU RUI design implements the majority of the UI functionality, such as trick play, on the server. Remote key presses are passed directly from each client to the server. The server interprets them, responds appropriately (e.g., changes channels), and blends UI graphics planes. It then delivers this UI bitmap data plus any streaming data (e.g. video and audio) back to the client for display.

The RVU Alliance says the result is a robust, consistent UI experience throughout the home via thin clients as opposed to implementations with an entire UI via client-side software. Key benefits attributed to RUI are that it is flexible enough to take advantage of the local graphic capabilities of the client and runs in a lightweight footprint.

DIRECTV is implementing RVU Alliance technology for its whole home requirements and Broadcom has been demonstrating the technology this year, having announced its support for RUI technology on its BCM7420 STB SoC solution and BCM3549 DTV SoC solution in January.

“RVU technology is expected to accelerate the availability of service provider content throughout the home, as a server-controlled and common user interface that not only allows display of service provider programme guide and menu screens, but enables the rapid introduction of new features and applications that typically accompany service provider content,” the company says.

“Refinements to the user experience can be deployed in the home with a single update in the RVU media server that appears on all subscribed thin client CE devices.”

The architecture that uses a centralized media server and thin clients has certainly gained favour and some commentators are even suggesting the trend towards thin clients could go so far as to dramatically reduce the market for ‘zapper’ set-top boxes.

Stephen Froehlich, Senior Analyst Consumer Electronics at IMS, for example, believes ‘open-standard secure home media network’, which is built on the DLNA and DTCP-IP protocols, threatens to replace high-value interactive set-top box with inexpensive open-standard thin clients called Pay TV DMAs (see full story here). Because televisions and other CE devices are also beginning to integrate Pay TV DMA functions, they should be able to displace set-top boxes entirely, he suggests. But while decoders become a commodity, set-top box vendors will be able to sell more complex home gateways where much of the STB intelligence can migrate.

For network operators, the key benefit of the Pay TV DMA approach is cost savings, as home gateways will be able to remove the duplication of STB functionality in multiple receivers. Froehlich estimates that a Pay TV DMA should cost an operator around $30-40 compared to around $150 for an MPEG-4 AVC HD interactive set-top box.

Paul Bristow, VP Strategy, Middleware and Consumer Experience at set-top box vendor ADB, has highlighted one big problem with the Pay DMA model (see full story here). As he noted: “With DMA, you don’t get a guide, you don’t get operator branding. So the way content will be displayed will be driven by the end-user device’s user interface.

“If we assume that technology will make it possible for DMAs to have a guide for example (like with the RVU Alliance in the US), then you have a business model competition: TV set manufacturers will control how well or how badly the user interface will respond (slow or fast). At the same time, TV set manufacturers are doing deals with OTT providers, so they will have a disincentive to make this remote user interface work.”

Videonet is publishing a (free) report in June that considers the wider requirements Pay TV operators face to make their content available not only on multiple TVs, but also on all kinds of CE devices including laptops and PMPs.

For that requirement there is a debate about whether operators should invest in intelligent media servers that can transcode content into the multiple formats and resolutions needed to feed different CE devices, and which have the ability to hand over content from the original Conditional Access to multiple DRMs, or whether they should start harnessing over-the-top infrastructure to deliver content to multiple screens inside the home as well as to reach consumers when they are away from home. We are also considering whether OTT ambitions by Pay TV operators are the natural first step towards becoming ‘cloud’ based media providers.

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