: Set-top boxes are winging their way into homes, bringing with them broadband applications
a PRIMEDIA Company ÿ
Global Telephony
March 1998
Asia/Pacific Rim; ISSN: 1067-6317
Set-top boxes are winging their way into homes, bringing with them broadband applications
ÿÿÿSometimes it seems that technology quietly evolves within the cocoon of one
country, and by the time it takes flight elsewhere, it emerges as a
completely different creature. Such was the case when the first interactive
television set-top boxes were introduced with great fanfare in the United
States earlier this decade. Widely publicized applications for home
banking, shopping and entertainment were enough to make service providers
salivate at the great market potential. But when trials did not live up to
exalted expectations, most carriers quickly withdrew their support and
looked to more fertile Internet fields to deliver high-end applications.
If some nations missed the early release of set-top boxes, it was probably
to their benefit because they also avoided the anti-climactic debuts and
missteps of the first versions. Ironically, the U.S. interactive set-top
niche now seems dormant compared to the rest of the world, which has
embraced the technology as a way to quickly step into the 21st century.
Part of the reason for this market growth is that countries with less
investment in existing copper or coaxial cable infrastructure in the local
loop can realistically consider and deploy fiber optic networks that reach
closer to customers' homes. Regardless of the delivery mechanism, video
viewing is the No. 1 reason subscribers around the world own set-top boxes.
Of course, video distribution does not require the capacity of fiber. But
the broadband infrastructure can ultimately springboard subscribers into
high-end applications that are yet to come.
Answering the video demand
Canada's New Brunswick province may seem an unlikely hub of technical
advancement, but it's actually a world leader in terms of access to
cutting-edge communications. The province is part of an initiative to build
a nationwide fiber optic network and was the first region in North America
to upgrade to a fully digital network.
New Brunswick Telephone Co.'s hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) network brings fiber
to the neighborhood. Subscribers have a choice of broadband applications,
such as high-speed Internet access, that are packaged at competitive prices.
The latest addition to the company's impressive list of services is an
interactive multimedia network called VideoActive. Used initially for
video-on-demand (VOD), the broadband scheme placed the actions of a video
cassette recorder in the network in the same way that voice mail simulates
an answering machine. VOD subscribers can peruse a long list of movies that
can be played, stopped and rewound at anytime.
NBTel took the idea one step further when it collaborated with
Toronto-based Digital Renaissance to enhance the service's interactive
assets. The result was Educational Video-On-Demand, a vast library of
videos that can be viewed, cut, pasted and completely edited via a
television or personal computer. One of the first VOD designs to support
both PC and TV platforms, EVOD also represents the first large-scale
deployment of Oracle's video server for Internet protocol-based VOD.
In building EVOD, Digital Renaissance modified it throughout a short
development span of six months. By the time it was market-ready, 17
different product releases had been issued.
"The challenges around this sort of application are that the technology
itself is evolving as the application is being developed, " explains Dave
Keeler, Digital Renaissance chief technology officer. "Proof of concept is
increasingly becoming part of the standard prototyping practice. It simply
allows the customer to see and respond to ideas much earlier.
"We have found that a lot of other companies' attempts to create this type
of product was spent writing specifications. By the time they were
finished, the design was obsolete because the technology had evolved. So
people ended up spinning their wheels and spending a lot of money producing
paper rather than learning more about the technology. "
Although NBTel is using HFC to deliver its multimedia services, Singapore
Telecom is on the fast track to deliver VOD and high-speed Internet access
over an asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) system that it kicked
off last year. The Singaporean carrier estimates that, by the end of 1997,
it had deployed more than 10,000 ADSL lines, representing the largest
commercial network for interactive multimedia services.
Singapore Telecom's Magix multimedia service also uses Oracle's video
server. The initial service offering may be video, but the carrier is
building a network that gives subscribers a gateway into some of the most
advanced multimedia applications right from a set-top box.
"Singapore Telecom takes a video-based focus to Magix, which I think is
going to be the wave of the future for telephony in the developing world, "
says Laurie Mann, Oracle director of advanced video systems. The carrier is
going to completely skip the buildout of a low-speed telephone service and
go right to multifunction, high-speed digital to deliver everything from
television to voice and fax, she says.
"The thing people are forgetting is that most of the world's population has
never seen a PC, " Mann adds. "A large portion of the world doesn't even
have a telephone. But what a lot of these people do have is a TV. So if you
can figure out a way to make that central information appliance a little
more useful and a little bit more interactive and connected, then there are
literally billions of people who can start participating in this technology
revolution. "
Standard fare
Like other sectors of communications, the small black box that delivers
connectivity to broadband applications is going digital. The conversion
promises a greater number of channels with potentially better audio and
voice quality, all of which can be combined with greater graphical support
for interactive and Internet applications (Table 1).
For now, though, most of the world's set-top users operate in analog or
advanced analog modes. Even when digital technology is more widely
launched, it's likely to merge in some capacity with analog, making it
difficult to draw a line between the two. Simply put, analog set-top boxes
receive analog encoded signals, digital set-top boxes receive digitally
encoded signals, and advanced analog boxes uses analog signals that include
a digitally encoded stream for accommodating Internet and e-mail
applications.
"That's when you get a blurring of technology distinctions, " says Steve
Necessary, general manager of analog video systems for Scientific-Atlanta.
"Advanced analog can provide many of the same interactive services as
digital. Indeed, those are, from an application standpoint, being delivered
to and from the box using digital technology. It's just that they're still
doing the video delivery using the analog technology. "
Scientific-Atlanta is beginning to see a layering of deployment strategy:
digital for the high-end range of services, advanced analog for the bulk of
the customer base and then the so-called standard analog for the
traditional products, Necessary says.
This relatively young industry has learned from the missteps of other
technologies that failed to standardize in the developmental years. With
the emergence of digital set-top boxes, manufacturers and operators formed
the Digital Video Broadcasting Group to write and promote international
standards. By the end of this year, standards-compliant boxes are expected
to be widely available in the European market, ridding consumers of
compatibility concerns between manufacturers' products and content
providers' services.
"We knew we needed standards in the digital business, " explains Henri
Joubaud, technical director of Canal+, Europe's largest cable television
company. "We understood that digital was a wide field and that there would
be a lot of applications and even a lot of boxes. "
>From the beginning, the box was not intended to be unique, he says. "There
have to be standards to open the market to several manufacturers and ensure
competition in prices. Also we thought that there would be room for a range
of boxes and a range of services. "
The DVB standard is a common scrambling, transmission and compression
standard that is built into Canal+ boxes, says Joubaud. "Our boxes are
developed on a software design that is highly portable and highly adaptable
to essentially any evolution, " he maintains. "In hardware, for example, if
you want to have a cable modem, we can do that, and it's not an impact on
the box. It's simply hardware you put on the box. "
A driving force behind the digital standards, Canal+ has been quick to
adapt the technology. In the two years since it launched its premier
service in France, the number of digital set-top boxes quickly escalated to
some 765,000. It followed by offering the enhanced service in Spain and
Italy.
Add that to its 9 million analog set-top boxes that it packages across most
of the continent, and Canal+ is clearly a world leader in providing
channels and content. But the market is not without its hurdles.
"The main issue that faces the industry is integration of chips and the
availability of chips, " Joubaud says. "When you are thinking of making
multimedia products that are more sophisticated and you want to have
something affordable for consumers, you need to have good prices. So at the
end of the day, the issue is with the silicon industry and the ability to
have reliable chips for a cheap price. "
Another common deficit is in content. "Content is probably the largest
challenge, " says Digital Renaissance's Keeler. "We've been working in this
particular space in a broadband perspective for almost five years. Right
from the get-go it was very clear that the technology would evolve to
provide powerful, high-speed services. But if there was no rich content to
leverage that, then there's no market.
Historically, one challenge telcos and cable companies have had is that
they move forward with a build and invest a lot of money in high-speed
trials, Keeler says. But, he adds, they don't necessarily invest a
corresponding amount for content and services to attract users to try the
technology out.
Services to build on
If attractive services are key to propelling this industry, U.S.-based
Polycom appears to be doing its part to advance the cause. Headquartered in
San Jose, California, Polycom unveiled in October a videoconferencing
system that transmits the service via a set-top box. The compact design is
a fraction of the size of the first videoconferencing packages that were
housed in cabinets and even much smaller than the roll-around versions.
"What happened is that the microprocessor technology has gotten down to
where you can build a whole videoconferencing system into a box that can go
on top of the TV, " says Brad Kayton, director of product marketing.
That box, known as ViewStation, has an embedded Web server that facilitates
ongoing maintenance and integrates presentations through Microsoft
PowerPoint software. Among its more visible beta testers is Oracle, which
is testing ViewStation in 67 locations and hopes to eventually launch the
service in 11 Latin American countries.
As the set-top market matures, expect more of these attractive
applications. Dallas-based uniView Technologies is drawing consumers into
set-top box technology with its in-home health monitor.
Patients can gauge their heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, blood
sugar levels and breathing levels, and send their readings on-line to
health care providers. When taking heart rates, for instance, the patient
places a clip on a finger to collect data that is then transmitted from the
set-top-box.
"We can't pretend to imagine the kinds of things that people will do with
this technology anymore than people could have known what television would
become after the invention of the first television, " says Digital
Renaissance's Keeler. "We can only use our historical perspectives to
imagine what sorts of things are possible with a broadband network. " |
