Jeremiah Golston
Chief Technical Officer, TI Streaming Media

This past week I had my annual trek to Amsterdam for the IBC show, which has become one of my favorite trade shows (except for the fact that it runs for five straight days including the full weekend). It is a great place to meet customers and key industry technologists across the entire ecosystem from production, content management, head-end encoders, servers, conditional access and client set-top boxes. One of the fun aspects is commuting to the show on the tram each day and mingling with a random mix of other players in the market. The Indonesian food is also excellent and a highlight each year!

It is interesting to watch the focus shift from one year to the next and see how the market progresses versus expectations from the previous year.

In 2003 we demonstrated support for the new advanced codecs, including H.264 and WMV9. This led to significant design-ins for the emerging IP set-top box business. In 2004 we saw early prototypes with the first full interop trials with head-end encoders, and by last year these boxes were entering production.

Much of the focus last year was on how the market would migrate to high-definition, including the concept of HD-ready boxes that would add HD support ahead of the actual capabilities of the network.

This year, while initial HD IP STBs are starting to ship, much of the focus shifted back to developing lower cost SD solutions since almost all of Asia and Latin America and much of the European market is still SD and operators have come to grips with higher costs of HD boxes versus optimized SD solutions.

Highlights in the TI booth this year included portable media players, digital media adapters, IP STBs and IP videophones, all implemented on the DaVinci™ technology platform. Early demonstrations of converged applications included a high-quality H.264 videophone at full VGA resolution integrated with a full IP STB interoperating with head-end encoders and VOD servers.

The flexibility of DaVinci technology enables multiple services to be offered on the same box, providing additional revenue opportunities for operators. Significant software development is required to integrate these capabilities seamlessly in the same product, but I’m betting that someone rises to the challenge to deliver converged products next year, building on the concepts in our early demos.

If you were at IBC and saw other interesting trends (or have a great Indonesian restaurant recommendation), we’d love to hear from you.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 10:39 am and is filed under TI Video360 Blog, DSP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.