The PODs are coming in the summer of 2000. Philips, Pioneer on the retail shelf..........................................
cableworld.com
PODs on Target to Invade Market in July 2000
But cable needs agreement from Hollywood, CE industry to make it happen
By Jim Barthold
Two thousand could be a brutal year for the cable industry. If it makes it unscathed past the Y2K bug in January, it must cope with the PODs invasion in July.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decreed that by the middle of 2000 consumers can purchase set-top boxes and digital televisions with slots to accommodate cable operator-provided Point of Delivery (POD) modules that decode digital TV signals and cable conditional access (CA) schemes.
Developing a reasonably priced module that pleases the consumer electronics industry, the cable industry, and the Hollywood studio moguls is a massive undertaking.
According to Don Dulchinos, business development director at CableLabs, it will happen.
"We're on track," Dulchinos insisted. "There was a deadline (January, 1999) to get it started, and we did. In July, we'll start interoperability testing and at the end of the year we need to have actual prototype cards, PCMCIA-style, and plug those in. Then we have six more months to make sure those work right."
Several variables add even more complexity to the process. First there is security. Cable, through the NCTA, and the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) agreed to a security scheme named 5C, after the five Intel Corp.-led companies that developed it.
This, though, only covers the security of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 1394 "firewire" between the source and the device receiving the digital signal to prevent unauthorized reception and copying of "in-the-clear" programs. The POD needs its own security.
"There's a flavor of 5C that you can use to do copy protection on the card and that's not standardized yet," said Dulchinos. "That's what we're working on. It's a three-way negotiation between cable, consumer electronics and Hollywood to agree on what's going to work there."
Then there's copyright protection.
"Copyright protection is a newer thing, like who contributed what. This will have to do with the computer industry, Internet industry, telephone industry, cable television industry, consumer electronics industry, whoever contributed the document or the source," said Ted Woo, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) standards director, which is in the process of certifying a national standard.
Finally, there is conditional access, or scrambling. Cable uses two nearly universal scrambling schemes - from General Instrument Corp. and Scientific-Atlanta Inc., although other international versions are available. GI and S-A agreed to work together in "Harmony" so that an MSO, using either set-tops or PODs, could interoperate both companies' set-tops in the same system.
"There are a number of customers in the industry interested in that and we expect we'll have it productized, probably even before the POD is commercially available," predicted Denton Kanouff, GI's digital network systems group marketing VP.
While the set-tops are compliant, there hasn't been a demand to mesh the two headend key exchange systems needed to talk interchangeably to them, added Bill Wall, technical director of S-A's subscriber networks group.
"Now, in a couple metropolitan areas, there are a few MSOs that want to deploy both sets of boxes," he reported.
Harmony may be inconsequential in the grand scheme of PODs.
"We started with OpenCable a year-and-a-half ago endorsing the Harmony agreement and trying to get the GI boxes to accept S-A conditional access and vice versa," said Dulchinos. "That's not so urgent these days because of the POD solution. The relevant access and control happens in the card itself, so the GI box and the S-A box don't necessarily have to talk to each other anymore."
Manufacturing could be the most difficult hurdle.
"By the summer of 2000 there should be some hardware coming out," said Woo. "Because we're still early in 1999, nobody is crying wolf yet."
Any manufacturing delays could open the door for newcomer SCM Microsystems Inc.
"So far, we have developed three (POD) generations in Europe, so we are working on number four here in the U.S.," said Luc Vantalon, SCM's digital TV product line director, emphasizing that SCM develops the CA module platform, not the CA module.
That means cooperation from GI and S-A "but so far they have not found any interest to do business with us. They want to develop their own solution from A to Z," he said.
True enough, said Wall.
"We've had some discussions with them, but there's certainly no decision to use them or not use them at this point," said S-A's Wall.
Overall, the quick development and deployment of PODs may come down to a single factor: economics. Operators, who have ordered "hundreds of thousands" of units to meet FCC demands, may not be eager to take delivery and provide them to subscribers who buy digital TVs or retail set-tops. And vendors may not be that willing to gear up factories to build products nobody wants.
It's Catch 22.
"The manufacturers are looking to how many the cable operators will buy," said an industry source. "If they promise a high quantity, like 10 million units, they won't mind the risk."
Vantalon agreed.
"It's difficult to tell when and how big the volume will be for this module on the first day."
Pioneer New Media Technologies Inc. has adopted SCM's POD. Vantalon hopes that MSOs will pressure GI and S-A to do the same.
"We'll put the problem on the table once again and maybe the POD issues will be different and the conclusion will be different. But from now to early next year, I don't think this type of pressure will happen," he predicted.
GI will be ready, promised Kanouff: "From our point of view, we're going to be ready and we're going to be hitting the milestones that we and CableLabs have laid out … and then working towards full product availability next year by July 1."
(March 22, 1999)
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