coverstory_cover story 20/08/2014 11:27 Page 4
nothing if the applications and
the products on which the user
is accessing them are failing to
deliver the content in a reliable,
secure, responsive and intuitive
way to those users. Content
owners will increasingly be
driven to bring release dates for
content delivered to the home
ever closer to cinema release
dates and with this an
increased focus on the
conditional access and DRM
capabilities of STBs and Smart
TVs.
SoftAtHome: Some features will move to
the cloud but: Quality of experience at home
will remain a key element. The home gateway
provides the best access (moving from ADSL
to VDSL, G.Fast or fibre) and the best
routing (Wi-Fi excellence, prioritisation of
packets.) Quality of the Rendering engine
will also be an important aspect; the STB
enables access to premium content in a
smooth and efficient way. Virtualisation is a
key development in our market. Pure cloud
players (Google, Amazon, etc) have
understood that and are investing in the
home/device domain.
Viaccess-Orca: In this context, we are
likely to see STBs evolving to become much
smaller, like a USB stick, in size. Home
gateways are expected to be positioned to a
Cable STB sales
perk up in Q1
Procurement activity by
North American cable
operators has had a
positive impact on the settop box sector, according to
market research firm
Infonetics Research’s 1st
quarter 2014 Set-Top Boxes
and Pay TV Subscribers
report, which tracks IP,
cable, satellite, and digital
terrestrial STBs and OTT
media servers.
“There was a pocket of
strength in the set-top box
market in the seasonally
weak first quarter. North
American cable operators
stepped up spending again
on top of successive
sequential revenue increases
as they transitioned higherend multiplay subscribers to
headed and headless video
18 EUROMEDIA
higher end, playing the role of a home hub,
in order to manage voice, data and video.
Smart TVs will evolve to become increasingly
more connected and embedded with many
more interactive services including apps.
Cloud will support Smart TVs by storing the
consumers’ content to enable access
anywhere, and at any time. Cloud TV will
also enable TV manufacturers to become
much more innovative, for example offering
different choices of User Interfaces with
Cloud UIs.
Euromedia: How do you ensure that a
subscriber can access the full range of
broadcast, premium, on-demand, and OTT
content?
ABOX42: Our STB platform offers a rich
SDK and a broad compatibility to different
streaming formats, DRMs and OTT
applications. It is quite easy for
the operator or middleware
providers to create a complete
TV user interface/application
with even DVB, Multicast and
Unicast content side by side, as
well as 3rd party applications
like HbbTV or Smart TV apps.
ActiveVideo: No matter what
resources are in the device, the
optimal way to ensure the
greatest diversity of content is
to implement virtual STB
functionality that moves all
necessary resources to the cloud and streams
user interfaces and content to any STB or
connected device.
AirTies: By having technology platforms or
devices purely based on standard
technologies, efficiently hosting content
provider applications, and making sure OTT
streaming and wireless capabilities are best
in class.
Albis: Our SceneGate STBs support the
relevant audio and video codecs, and
streaming and security solutions to ensure
the full range of services.
Amino: From an STB perspective, there
have been great strides to bring together all
these elements into a single, secure and
increasingly sophisticated device. For us,
we’ve moved quickly from introducing high
quality HLS functionality to adding HTML5
gateways and replaced
ageing, power-hungry
standard-definition