Philips plans to "TriMedia" again in a settop. Showing off MediaOne boxes and cable modems.....................................
multichannel.com
Broadband Week for May 10, 1999
Philips Hopes Retail Clout Means Modems Will Thrive
By BILL MENEZES May 10, 1999
Bolstered by its foothold with MediaOne Group Inc., Philips Broadband Networks Inc. said it is gearing up to further crack the U.S. market for advanced broadband equipment.
Building on its February deal to supply MediaOne with "open-system-based" digital set-top boxes, Philips last week formally unveiled its standards-based cable modem, which, it said, completes a product lineup aimed at exploiting U.S. operators' desires to deploy advanced services and to create a retail channel for customer-premises broadband gear.
Besides manufacturing scale economies that hold down its product costs, the Atlanta-based unit of electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics boasts a huge, established U.S. consumer-electronics retail presence -- a key for MSOs entering uncharted retail-sales waters.
While progress in creating relationships between cable operators and potential retail partners has been sluggish, Philips' retail channel, supported by a $100 million branding campaign, moves billions of dollars per year worth of televisions, DVD players, hand-held computers, cellular phones and other digital gear.
"We know how those retail channels work. We know what they're looking for," said Dave Torr, Philips Broadband's group manager for data/voice-access systems.
Philips briefed reporters in advance of the upcoming SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, where it plans to showcase its open-system-based set-tops for MediaOne; its Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification-based modem; a point-of-deployment security module based on its "CryptoWorks" conditional-access system; and other digital-video solutions.
Philips also touted "SpectraHub," a 1550-nanometer dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing solution that it claims will boost transmission capacity on existing hybrid fiber-coaxial systems to more than 9,200 compressed digital-video channels per fiber, or a 100-fold improvement over competing solutions.
The new DOCSIS 1.0 modem, currently dubbed the "PD10D," did not gain certification by Cable Television Laboratories Inc. Philips said it expects to pass the next wave of interoperability testing, tentatively scheduled to begin May 12.
The retail model is still up in the air, Torr said. The key factor in that equation crucial to MSOs is the allocation of costs, like subsidies to lower the consumer cost of the modem.
"The correct retail model will vary from operator to operator," Torr said. "Some operators we're talking to don't see retail for years to come. The precise model will depend on how the money flows work out for each relationship."
Torr said the modem -- based on the widely used Cisco Systems Inc. reference design -- has been deployed in trials with 20 operators in the United States, Asia, South America and Europe.
Philips has been in the cable-modem business for about three years, distributing Com21 Inc.'s proprietary cable modems -- a relationship Torr said would likely continue even as his company gains DOCSIS business.
Philips is also developing a modem based on the recently released DOCSIS 1.1 specification, which covers advanced features that are necessary to offer cable telephony. Versions will include one with universal-serial-bus connectivity; an internal PCI-card (peripheral component interconnect) modem; and, eventually, an external unit to install outside of a home or office.
To help penetrate the digital set-top market -- which is currently dominated by General Instrument Corp. and Scientific-Atlanta Inc. -- Philips pointed to its experience in providing equipment for virtually all elements of digital-video systems, from studio and transmission equipment to its DWDM networking upgrade.
Director of business development Paul Pishal said Philips has shipped more than 2 million digital receivers worldwide, beginning with its 1995 deployment with France's Canal Plus.
That is a track record of interoperability with a variety of headends and conditional-access systems, enhanced by a focus on open systems specified by the U.S. industry's OpenCable standards initiative.
Philips also claimed a significant core technology advantage through "TriMedia," the programmable voice, video and data chip it will use in a high-end OpenCable set-top that is expected to be available at year's end.
That box will support Microsoft Corp.'s Windows CE and Network Computing Inc.'s application programming interfaces; a DOCSIS modem; interactive applications; and selective conditional access.
Pishal said TriMedia performs 5 billion operations per second, and its capabilities include encoding and decoding of MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG–4 video streams; Dolby Digital AC3; an H.324 reference design for videoconferencing; and digital-television features such as an electronic program guide.
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