Sony set top box discussed at the end........................
Set-Top Boxes Get Ready To Roll
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Electronic Engineering Times via Individual Inc. : Early this year, Sony
president Nobuyuki Idei let it be known that Sony was talking to News Corp.
CEO Rupert Murdoch about acquiring a major stake in JSkyB, the digital
satellite-broadcasting service (DSS) now getting started in Japan.
That news (and a favorable yen-dollar exchange rate), sparked a major rally
in Sony's shares. Indeed, analysts believe Idei puts more stock in the DSS
and set- top box businesses than in the digital-video-disk player, at least
for the next few years.
Much of the stock market's attention focused on Sony's ability to provide
movies as well as music to the DSS video and radio channels. The set-top box
(STB) also is a central piece in Sony's consumer electronics vision-a kind
of home router to an intelligent television or PC.
"We call the set-top box an electrical post office," said Yukio Kubota, a
vice president of Sony's display company. The STB of today is part of the
pay-TV revolution, but "free TV is a much larger opportunity." The STB will
be "a key element" in the delivery of localized broadcasting to intelligent
television sets. The "passive" television of today must give way to a
TV-plus-STB combination that will allow people to receive and respond to,
local content, "which is what people most care about," Kubota said.
"The main intention of Sony is to create a new business related to the color
television. Sony makes 12 million color televisions a year and we must add
some intelligence and create an open-standard platform. WebTV is just a
small example of how a consumer platform could supply information to
consumers quite easily," he said.
That may be a vision for tomorrow, one of many . But in the here and now, an
extremely competitive race is developing among the DSS providers, the STB
manufacturers and the semiconductor vendors.
Japanese companies are selling set-top boxes to Japan's content-starved
consumers at a rapid clip, though there are fears that the momentum will
flag unless attractive content is developed. PerfectTV, Japan's first
digital satellite broadcasting service, was launched last October and has
signed up more than 200,000 Japanese subscribers. JSkyB will begin service
with a limited number of channels soon and DirecTV Japan will launch its
service in early autumn.
Jimmy Schaeffer, a DBS analyst at The Carmel Group, said, "Just like
Britain, Japan is an island nation that is starved for good, quality TV.
That is why DSS services have gotten off to a phenomenal start and the major
competition that is developing in Japan will keep prices down and bring the
quality up."
The Carmel Group's sees growth in the DBS market worldwide. Another major
opportunity is AIM (advanced integrated multimedia) terminals, which would
deliver Internet and other content to home PCs, either via satellite or
digital cable. "The biggest new opportunities are AIM services that will
deliver stocks, sports and other big files to the home office. This is going
to be a killer," said Schaeffer.
Japan may be unique in that PerfectTV and JSkyB will cooperate, so that
customers may use one dish and STB to receive a mix of pay channels from
either DSS provider. And it is likely that DirecTV, though it uses a
different satellite that may require a slightly larger dish, will use a
compatible STB. Japan's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications appears to
have succeeded in its arm-wrestling campaign to inject across-the-board STB
compatibility into Japan's emerging DSS marketplace.
Keeping up content quality translates, of course, into more chip sets sold.
That's why the semiconductor managers in Japan are fretting.
"Everyone is worried that the momentum may slow down if the content itself
is poor. There is no killer application yet, like a good home-shopping
channel and the quality of the movies is not that high. But once competition
develops among the three Japanese DSS companies, there will be more content.
Murdoch (JSkyB) and Hughes (DirecTV) are in a good position because they
have the richest number of programs that can attract more people," said one
marketing manager.
Being able to choose from among several DSS services will require that the
STBs support a larger number of program identification (PID) codes without
increasing the amount of discrete memory, noted Mark O'Brien, director of
marketing for STB products at LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.)
Each semiconductor vendor has a slightly different MCU strategy. LSI and
Toshiba Corp. each has developed STB chip sets that incorporate a MIPS
processor core, while VLSI Technology's philosophy is to keep the MCU as a
separate device.
"We believe in reasonable partitioning," said Yuzuru Utsumi, a VLSI
Technology Japan manager. Japan may be unique in that several of the STB
manufacturers retain allegiance to their company's in-house MCU: Hitachi
Ltd. may prefer to use its SH processor in its set-top boxes, Sharp may opt
for an Arm processor, while Matsushita Electric supports a proprietary MCU.
VTI's own integration road map eventually calls for an on-chip MCU, and VLSI
Technology holds licenses to both the Hitachi SH and ARM cores.
Utsumi said, "In our second-generation chip set (now being sampled) we will
keep offering a separate CPU. Our customers need to port their software from
the first generation to their second-generation boxes. They want to
concentrate on enhancing the on-screen display and offering richer feature
sets while working with a processor that they already know how to code."
Thomson Electronics and SGS-Thomson, the leading suppliers of STBs and STB
silicon, respectively, support the Inmos CPU. Texas Instruments, which is
entering the market with a highly integrated chip set, uses an ARM core. LSI
Logic's Integra three-chip set includes a MiniRisc core on the transport,
embedded central processor and control IC.
Motoaki Koyama, who managed the design of Toshiba's STB chip set now being
readied for sampling, said Toshiba's view is that STB engineers are less
concerned about which CPU they are dealing with than in the overall support
offered by the IC vendor.
"Toshiba offers these engineers a complete package, including the
development tools. STB designers want the solution that gives them the
fewest headaches, with the most support. If a company buys a variety of ICs
from different vendors, they may find that one part is out of stock for a
while. But in our case, Toshiba not only provides the three main chips, we
also can deliver the 16-Mbit synchronous DRAM and other components," Koyama
said.
Toshiba also is in a position to integrate an STB with a VCR, or develop a
DVD player that could serve as the MPEG-2 decoder for a satellite video
stream, Koyama said. However, given the rapid changes in those markets, it
may be too early to launch integrated products. Adding a particular function
quickly is more difficult in highly integrated products, when a stable
product is integrated with a rapidly changing one.
Koyama, who developed the MPEG-2 decoder used in Toshiba's DVD player, said
Toshiba is the first Japan-based company to develop an integrated STB chip
set in a market dominated by European and U.S. silicon vendors.
Toshiba's competitors argue that they have a substantial lead in the STB
silicon market. O'Brien said LSI and SGS-Thomson benefit from being the two
"qualified" IC suppliers for the STBs used in the various SkyB services.
Once BSkyB converts to digital broadcasting and EchoStar and Sky complete
their merger in the U.S. market, Murdoch and his partners will be more
influential.
"We believe Toshiba is at least a year away from getting qualified" by one
of the major players in the DSS business," O'Brien said. LSI has worked with
News Corp. to add security logic and conditional access software and has
other design teams worldwide working with other DSS companies. Japanese IC
vendors will be hard-pressed to catch up, he said.
Kubota said Sony has shipped about 600,000 STBs worldwide and considers
itself behind only Thomson Electronics in that field. Sony works with LSI,
SGS- Thomson, VLSI Technology and C-Cube, though he said Sony is open to new
silicon vendors. He said Sony is considering a third chip-set vendor, which
he declined to name, for the STBs manufactured for the various Sky DSS
services.
Japan's burst of DSS activity is matched by the continued rapid growth in
the more mature U.S. and European markets. However, though DSS service
providers in Taiwan and South Korea have tried to get established, their
markets may not be ready to support an indigenous service yet. But the large
Korean consumer- electronics companies have been active worldwide in the STB
business.
Richard Doherty, senior editor of the newsletter Envisioneering, said, "The
wild card in the STB market is the cross-market opportunities. Will a
set-top box also be able to support digital terrestrial broadcasting? Will a
customer be able to slap on 'side car' products such as a DVD adapter?
Companies-LG Electronics is one good example-are starting to look at the STB
as a kernel of their consumer business, a product that is extensible."
Before new markets such as HDTV can be conquered, STB makers must figure out
how to solve a more immediate problem: how to support local terrestrial
broadcasting. A person in New York City who may receive a multitude of DSS
channels needs a simple way to switch from a DSS channel to a local news
station. Kubota said Sony is aware of the challenge, but declined to say
when its STB products will offer a solution to local channel support.
Copyright 1997 CMP Media Inc.
<<Electronic Engineering Times -- 03-31-97, p. 108>>
[Copyright 1997, CMP Publications] |
