coverstory_cover story 12/07/2013 17:23 Page 1
uromedia: Can STBs really become the centre of the connected consumer's home, or do they risk losing out to games consoles and Smart TVs? How must they develop to maintain their importance? Accedo: STBs can play a role in the future by creating a more integrated in-home experience than any OTT device can do. Albis: There are many ways to manage a connected home, and STBs can play a relevant role as they provide an ideal platform. In addition to their current functionally based SoC capabilities, they will have to provide and manage connectivity in the home; in conjunction with a basic gateway device. Amino: As technology is evolving, there is a
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content and initial investment cost. Easel TV: There is a strong argument that the STB is moving to the cloud and that the “operator as an app” model is going to be the preferred route in the medium to long term. Indeed there are factions within major operators and solution providers
With Digital Switchover complete in the major European territories, viewers are largely accessing their content via set-top boxes or connected, 'Smart' TVs. What role will such devices play, with some companies suggesting they will not serve unprofitable markets, TV sets reportedly remaining unconnected, and the cloud increasingly becoming both the storage and intelligence? Euromedia asked a range of industry experts for their views on the sector. Here are the initial findings of the Survey.
STB and Smart TV Survey 2013
much wider range of devices, network delivery options, media formats and security protocols. STBs pay a critical role in enabling people to enjoy a wide range of content across multiple screens within the home. Arris: The emergence of the Connected / Smart TV and games console as a video viewing device has opened up a world of new content to traditional TV watchers and those who don’t want to be tied to a particular provider but who want basic access to new IPbased services. Conax: STBs will in many cases become the centre of the living-room. Serving in-home multiscreen devices through a media-gateway STB has some clear advantages over doing OTT multiscreen. For the operator, mediagateway STBs can offer advantages related to content rights, bandwidth use, QoS for linear that say “we have deployed our last STB”. In the short-term the STB can offer a more complete end-to-end experience that better integrates live broadcast though this differentiator will fade quite quickly. EKT: For two reasons we see the STB as the main device to connect to content to the large screens in the home. 1- Quality of Service: For the operator to be certain of the user experience they offer the end user – they need to control the complete ecosystem from head-end, signal delivery, User Interface, features to the STB and the remote control. 2- Branding: The end user must be constantly engaging in a positive operators branding experience. By leaving in-house hardware to third parties, it will lose its direct to consumer link and as such be more prone to customers switching to competitors offering (either to a direct operator offering or OTT solution). Furthermore, so long as TV technology keeps changing then STBs will have a place in the home …however as we move towards true hybrid solutions with content being delivered over several different mediums with different CA / DRM then the idea of a Gateway box feeding many clients (be they STBs or TVs) becomes commercially appealing to the network operators, the manufacturers and the end user (who really doesn’t want lots of boxes with different RCU etc..) Entone: A traditional set-top box is a selfcontained device for receiving, decrypting, converting and displaying pay-TV services at a single location. More recently, STB functions have expanded to include search, navigation, recording and interactive services. In some senses, STBs are disappearing but in another sense, they’re really just adapting and evolving. Farncombe: Yes, STBs can evolve to remain the centre, by becoming a connected hub and gateway to allow distribution of content in the home. Tablets, phones, games consoles would get their content from this home hub. httv: STBs bring two main values. The first one is that it gives the possibility to pay-TV operators to have full control of their platform and through it of their subscribers. The second one is that it cost much less than Smart TV or even Games Consoles, allowing
"So long as TV technology keeps changing then STBs will have a place in the home." EKT
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