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Carrier Services
Microsoft TV Supports System-on-a-Chip STBs
‘Advanced’ Set-Top Boxes Now Available
by Ken Wieland
Microsoft TV has announced at the BBWF event that its IPTV
Edition software platform can support SoC (system-on-a-chip)
set-top boxes (STBs) from Cisco, Motorola, Philips and
Tatung.
“It might not sound the most glamorous part of the IPTV
industry but SoC [system-on-a-chip] set-top boxes is a major
development,” says Christine Heckart, general manager of
marketing for Microsoft TV. “It will significantly bring down the
total cost of ownership [for IPTV deployment].”
With SoC STBs, advanced functionality – such as HDTV, digital
video recording and ‘picture-in-picture’ – is hardwired onto
silicon. By not using software, this brings the cost of the STB
down.
It’s a development welcomed by Helmut Leopold, Telekom
Austria’s MD for platform technology. Although Telekom
Austria is not a customer of Microsoft TV – it uses Alcatel’s
OMP system for its IPTV software – he is currently in
discussion with suppliers for next-generation STBs.
“At the moment, STBs are in the €100-120 range, which is too
high,” he says. “We need that price to come down and still
support HDTV and MPEG-4. I would say that for IPTV to be a
mass market proposition, STBs would need to be in the €60-
70 range.”
As for Microsoft TV, it has 14 publicly announced customers
for IPTV Edition. But with the exception of some small-scale
commercial rollouts by AT&T, Verizon, T-Online France and
Swisscom, all of Microsoft TV’s service provider customers are still in trial
phase. AT&T, notably, has still to make a big marketing push
on its U-Verse service, restricting availability to San Antonio
where it has 5,000 IPTV subscribers (although a nationwide
launch in the US is scheduled before the end of the year).
Heckart argues, however, that Microsoft TV has nothing to be
apologetic about in terms of getting IPTV to market. “The
whole IPTV ecosystem has been put in place within three
years but it took the cable industry much, much longer than
that.”
According to Heckart, churn reduction is the prime motive for
IPTV rollout by Microsoft TV’s telco customers (apart from BT
Vision, which is prioritizing interactive services). “They’re looking first at getting a very
good TV experience to market and then, once that’s
established, they will turn their attention to things like
blended services and advertising.”
The IPTV emphasis from the likes of Alcatel and Lucent is
somewhat more ambitious, outlining elaborate IPTV scenarios
such as IM over TV
and the ability to continue viewing a
movie on a handset if suddenly needing to leave the comfort
of the living room (see ).
While Heckart clearly disagrees with this marketing approach,
she stopped short of saying it was doing the IPTV industry a
disservice.
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