General

Moto IPTV — continued

Making it easier to develop and integrate third-party applications may be a more important competitive advantage in Europe, though, Stein says. The North American IPTV market tends to be more "meat and potatoes," he says.

In a recent move, the company announced its IPTV set tops will now incorporate Motorola's NBBS device management system, making the boxes remotely manageable by service providers.

NBBS (Netopia Broadband Server) is a standards-based device management platform originally developed by Netopia, now a Motorola company, using TR-069, an open application layer protocol for remote management of end-user devices on DSL networks. The base technology is available to any STB maker.

"It gives us a competitive advantage because we're using it and others haven't implemented it yet," Stein says. "But there is nothing proprietary with what we've done with NBBS."

NBBS automates some provisioning tasks, continually reports back to the service provider over the network on the status and performance of NBBS-enabled components, and also provides a remote troubleshooting capability.

"We announced this in part to show that we're more than just a set top manufacturer," Stein says. "We have the whole end-to-end issue in mind. For service providers, this should mean fewer truck rolls and they'll be able to offer more services."

Motorola doesn't have many other unique technological advantages, he concedes. STBs include a lot of standard components—MPEG decoders, USB ports, etc.—that vary little from one vendor to another. Which is why there are few technical barriers to entry.

The company has paid special attention to green issues, reducing carbon emissions in its manufacturing processes and ensuring the STBs themselves are Energy Star certifiable. Products certified under the U.S. government-run Energy Star program must meet strict guidelines for power efficiency.

Motorola's biggest competitive advantage may just be its size and experience. It is, according to Stein, the largest producer in the world of STBs of all kinds, not just IPTV.

"That gives us a big leg up in logistics, in support, in supply chain management—intangibles you don't see in the box," he says. "And it means we can more quickly ramp up [development and manufacturing] to meet service providers' needs, or to change [manufacturing] quantities."

Because of its strong legacy in the cable and satellite TV industries, the company also has a huge research and development effort around STBs, a great deal of which benefits the IPTV products as well.

Distribution
Much of that effort recently has centered around making it easier to distribute media within a home—from an STB to multiple TV sets, for example. The main focus is wireless, chiefly 802.11N, the soon-to-be ratified third generation of Wi-Fi that can deliver up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps) of bandwidth.

"[Wireless] makes installation very simple," Stein says. "[Without it], it can sometimes be fairly onerous to put a new IPTV network inside a home."

The other challenge wireless can help meet is enabling "media mobility"—the ability to easily transfer photos taken with a phone camera to the IPTV system for viewing on a TV, for example, or transferring video recorded on a PVR to a portable media player.

But Wi-Fi is only one of the in-home distribution technologies Motorola and other STB vendors are looking to integrate into their products.

Others include the wireline technologies being developed and promoted by Home PNA (media over existing twisted pair and coax in a home), the MultiMedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), and HomePlug Alliance (media over home electrical wiring). A new version of the HomePlug technology, for example, HomePlug AV, is rated to deliver 100 Mbsp over home wiring, plenty of bandwidth for moving high-quality video around a home.

It's worth trying to meet the in-home distribution challenges, Stein believes, because IPTV is clearly on a roll. While he refers to the growth trend as "steady," the MRG data would suggest he's understating the case.

Certainly the technology drivers are in place. Bandwidth in the last mile is increasing with VDSL and ADSL2+. Video compression technologies are constantly improving. TVs are getting better and cheaper. Hard drive capacity continues to increase while prices drop, making it less expensive to build PVRs.

"It's all working towards making IPTV a long-term viable service for telcos," Stein says.

And even cable companies might turn to IPTV to help them deliver Internet-related applications and services along with TV, he believes.

The only damper on this rosy prospect? The economy. New ADSL2+ networks can deliver the bandwidth, but they don't come cheap.

Still, if we had to pick the set-top box manufacturer most likely to sail through a recession unscathed, it would have to be Motorola.

—End

< Back to page one