The Skinny on Set-Tops
theneteconomy.com
Thin client, fat client – what’s the difference? Turns out, it’s plenty
By Jonathan Blum
Consider the set-top, that squat little box that connects most households to the wonderful world of television. It looks kind of bland, kind of functional. Definitely not sexy. But don't be fooled: That box could hold the keys to the broadband networking future.
If you think those keys are going to be easy to get to, think again. Actually delivering video is turning out to be tough.
"You get this eerie feeling when dealing with network folks that they are suddenly realizing how hard video is to do," says Scott Wilcox, senior vice president at Prasara Technologies, a provider of interactive software. "They almost sort of think it is going to scale like some Internet thing — which it absolutely positively will not."
A big holdup is the core operating system operators must use to offer video. The actual choice of software products, usually from either Microsoft, Liberate Technologies or OpenTV, is clouded by unfinished backbone networks, incompatible standards, contrary vendor visions and uncertain development paths. Plus the stakes could not be higher.
"We do frankly get a glimpse of the end of our business from our operating software systems choices," says Bill Weeks, chief strategic officer at Next Level Communications, a supplier of interactive TV technology. "We know that if we don't get this right, we could lose control of our destiny."
So complicated
Things did not start out that way. The software that controls set-tops used to be simple. Supplied by vendors like Microware and Wind River, the software boiled down to nothing more than an instruction set that changed the volume and channels of your TV and maybe offered a offer some pay-per-view content — usually stuff like Debbie Does Dallas or professional wrestling.
That all changed in the mid-90s when deceptively powerful services called electronic program guides swept cable. An EPG is an entire channel of nothing more than a listing of what is on the other channels. Consumers loved these services, and network operators were more than happy to oblige them — and pick up a nice revenue stream from the ads that ran above the channel listings 24 hours a day.
There was just one catch: You couldn't even turn up the volume on those early systems without going through the EPG provider, usually Gemstar. "It really scared everybody," says Allan Thygesen, executive vice president of sales and business development at Wink Communications, which sells interactive e-commerce services. "The industry quickly saw that whoever controls that EPG in effect controls the set-top box and a big chunk of the network."
But there was no turning back. Cable operators knew their futures rode on making the transition to interactivity, even if they hadn't figured out how to protect their core businesses.
That's when the cable industry ran smack into the essential TV problem: the thin client vs. fat client debate. The client side set-top box is only half the advanced content equation; a big server, usually sitting in a network distribution point, is needed to work hand-in-hand with the set-top box. The delicate balance that these two machines must strike is the essential problem any broadband application manages.
Operators quickly divided into two camps about how to best manage that problem: those who felt the set-tops should be big fast computers, and those who thought the set-top should be as skinny as possible.
No fat chips
The thinnest of thin side is championed by OpenTV. OpenTV now has 9.3 million boxes deployed worldwide and firmly believes that all the heavy lifting should be done at the network distribution point using optimized code.
"That way more machines can run it," says Vincent Dureau, OpenTV's CTO. "We are seeing more interest from American network operators as they see the thin client approach offers them the largest possible audience."
Leading the fat side of the struggle is Microsoft. Its formidable PC experience leads Microsoft to claim that the set-top should handle all operations out on the very edge of the network, even if the network itself is not in place to offer the services. Microsoft is pushing its Windows CE to fill that need.
Liberate Technologies falls somewhere in the middle — literally. Liberate puts some intelligence in the set-top and some in the distribution point. Its main focus is on the middleware that connects the two sides. The end result is more flexibility — but more complexity as well.
A case of whatever
One of the ironies of the debate is that ultimately, the fat-client approach can do anything that the skinny approach can do, and vice versa. "What is perverse here is, from an engineering point of view, the choice really doesn't matter," says Dave Caputo, CTO at PixStream, a video technology supplier bought last month by Cisco Systems. "Anything can be done in either approach."
Why? The base operating system is hilariously simple. The tricky work is done by middleware applications that run on top of the operating systems. These middle-ware apps broker the transactions between the client set-top and main central server, therefore leveraging the network. But functionality can be put on either the client or the server side, depending on the solutions. So the middleware is crucial. "It's the most important application from our point of view," says Charlier Tritschler, senior vice president of marketing at Liberate. "It's no accident that we offer the only pure-play middleware product."
Depending on how that middleware is configured, Internet applications based on Java, Cold Fusion or HTML can work on the platform. Liberate makes great hay about how its standard is open and light enough to run on most new boxes and still offer powerful services.
Network differences
The lack of consensus on the set-top front is not totally the fault of the vendors. Each and every network operator has its own plan about to how best offer service, and each built its network accordingly. The end result: Every single network is slightly (and maddeningly) different.
"It is simply impossible for a casual observer to understand how complex and specific every particular operator's solution is," says Scott Swix, director of systems architecture development at BellSouth. "We simply will not make judgments on any product without literally teams of engineers and an extensive qualifying process."
Software woes don't end there. Each application that rides on top of middleware, such as e-commerce apps and e-mail, requires a different server at the network distribution point that must function with the rest of the applications and servers. How these apps and servers actually will fit together is a significant unknown at this point.
One big criticism of Liberate's one-size-fits-all middleware approach is that its scalability is suspect, or at least it hasn't been demonstrated. After all, if the modern interactive network evolves to be as feeble and confused as the modern PC, the networking business has created a royal headache for itself.
Because the systems themselves really don't exist yet, it's still too early to call a winner. Although Open-TV claims that there will be 10 million homes with interactive set-tops by the end of this year, at most only half of those homes are connected to digital networks, and even fewer are connected to digital networks that support interactivity.
"What the operators are asking for is very challenging," says Weeks of Next Level. "The fact still remains that if you are looking for a reliable, provisionable, remote monitored system, there just is no real standard as of now."
But there are plenty of choices. |
