Putting hard drives in the box.....................
cableworld.com
Hard Drives Will Expand Box Capabilities
By Jim Barthold
As interactivity becomes more complex, cable set-tops will start to have hard drives, either as internal components or connected, standalone units.
"Once you get hard drives and once you get storage ™ I think you'll be able to start to handle the people who are really TV-philes and watch 25 or 30 or 40 different channels and watch a lot of things and multi-task," predicted Bow Rodgers COO of Power TV Inc.
The so-called "Y" generation of TV viewers, estimated at 75 million strong, seems to dictate that set-tops become computers hooked to televisions.
"This Y generation does a lot of what we call multitasking," explained Kishore Manghnani, marketing VP for TeraLogic Inc. "They could be on the Internet and watching TV and maybe even on the telephone at the same time. Those are the people who are likely to go to this fourth, or highest level of interactivity."
For that they'll need the storage capacity of hard drives.
"It's an option any operator can take, and we will have some operators who utilize that option," said Denton Kanouff, marketing VP for General Instrument Corp.'s Digital Networks Systems.
The option, though, might not be available until set-tops hit retail.
"The (MSOs) have to be able to see some payback in terms of putting that hard drive in. I think once we get more into the retail space, consumers will see the value," said Bill Wall, technical director of Scientific-Atlanta Inc.'s subscriber networks.
Satellite providers already see disk storage as a way to boost their "interactive offerings" to compete with cable.
"With hard drive storage inside the set-top box, they can actually deliver overnight Web pages ™ so all the pages that the software thinks you will be interested in can be downloaded proactively to the hard disk," said Andy Trott, Pace Micro Technology plc's CTO.
"You're opening up a different form of interactivity where you're interacting with the hard disk of cached programming and content," he continued.
That could be overkill in a cable box with a flexible headend and two-way capability.
"The storage just adds another dimension to flexibility," replied Paul Pishal, Phillips Electronics N.V.'s product strategy director.
Pishal and others in the industry see the set-top - with or without a hard drive - as a gateway to e-commerce applications that will be supported by sponsoring companies such as banks.
"We're talking to a number of individual companies in a number of areas now that really want to be able to do product branding, have a particular channel dedicated to them on a system ™ like a banking service coming through," said Wall. "Branding and targeted ads are going to become bigger and bigger. and being able to do things with those product names on the screen are going to be important."
"Right now, we're talking to someone about putting an ATM screen right on the TV," added Rodgers. "That, banks would love. You're not going to get money spitting out of the VCR, but you can look at your balance, what checks cleared, what interest rate you're getting."
It is, Rodgers emphasized, something "the banks would clearly love to subsidize."
Technically, adding a hard drive is no big deal.
"Every (top-of-the-line digital) DCT-5000 has a standard feature which is an IDE interface, just like a PC," said Kanouff. "If you have a PC and you want to expand your memory capacity, you go buy a hard drive and you plug it into one of these interfaces. It's the same one."
From a chips standpoint, that's a no-brainer, said Tim Lindenfelser, marketing VP for Broadcom Corp.
"It's just another connection to the internal BUS of the set-top box. Rather than store information into RAM or DRAM you can now store it on the disk," he explained.
That storage then becomes a "gateway," said Manghnani.
"It gives the consumer tremendous control of what's coming in, how to manage the content, how to package the content, how to display the content," he pointed out. "Once you have a hard drive on these set-tops, you could dump other video from this hard disk to the home network and connect other networking devices, other TVs, other boxes in your home through this gateway."
You could also manipulate the content, including selecting the bit rate speed at which video is stored.
"A lot of digital transmissions ™ are variable rate encoded because they're stat muxed (statistically multiplexed)," explained Brian Johnson, C-Cube Microsystems Inc.'s VP-advanced development. "What you're going to be able to do is guarantee how much storage space you have on the drive" by selecting a bit rate speed on which to record and store material.
Johnson said different quality levels, based on bit rate speed, could resemble today's VCRs.
(October 25, 1999)
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