News

Vidanti's HDTV over IP technology will change the set top box as we know it (21/11/2005)

One hundred channels and nothing on TV? Maybe the problem is that other people are making your choices for you. Or maybe it's because your schedule means you are busy when the best programmes are on, and there's nothing good on during your time off?

A new type of Digital TV delivery promises to change that. It's called IPTV because it uses the Internet to carry television programmes and movies, as opposed to terrestrial, cable or satellite. Instead of your cable box or satellite dish, you use your high speed broadband connection to stream programmes (or on-demand videos) to your TV set. And you can surf the web from your living room TV, as well as from the PC in your study.

Best of all, because you get all these services (voice, broadband and television) from a single supplier, you save money overall.

IPTV will offer a schedule of programmes just like today, via an electronic programme guide. It will provide a "catch up" facility that allows you to watch any content from the past 7 days. You can select programmes from the next 14 days, and it will record the content to your set top box hard drive for later viewing.

But if there is nothing that you want to see, use the box to open a link to an Internet TV site (Google and Yahoo are candidates) and see what they have to offer. Or, link to a broadcaster site (e.g. the BBC) to view something from an archive of over 600,000 hours of content.

But don't confuse this with downloading clips to your PC that turn out to be only watchable in small windows (or very poor quality at full screen). Apart from the fact that IPTV is meant to be watched on your TV, it can be created as High Definition (HD) content so you will get the most from your 'HDTV-Ready' LCD, Plasma or other digital TV set - that's 4 times the resolution of today's Digital TV.

Vidanti are completing their first range of HDTV-over-Broadband set top boxes for service operators entering the new IPTV market. As well as HDTV decoding using the most advanced new standards (MPEG-4 Part 10, AVC / H.264), it does everything you'd expect when surfing the web, including wireless connections over 802.11g and free or cheap voice-over-IP calls.

Unlike many of their competitors, Vidanti's "Triple Play" (data, voice, television) set top box is made using new "system on chip" silicon that significantly lowers the cost.

"We can do this because we've spent years working on Broadband home devices," said Paul Walsh, CEO of Vidanti. "We estimate that at least 1 in every 5 ADSL modems deployed worldwide is using a chip and software developed by us from our Virata days, and we learned how to add video to the mix when we were part of Conexant Systems."

Vidanti is a start-up that is still less than 3 months old, having started in August 2005, but they can still claim a 'world first' when they announce product later this year.

"We think HDTV is the only way to go for IPTV," continues Walsh. "Satellite companies will do it, and Telcos will be overshadowed when they should be competing on the key difference of IPTV - the fact that you can interact with it, search with it, and generally be in control."

Walsh also sees other dramatic changes from IPTV. "Not every home has or wants a PC, but nearly every home has a TV."

IPTV is already available in Hong Kong, Japan, France and Italy, and is starting to roll out in the USA. But early deployments have been limited to older MPEG-2 technology and the potential has not been fully realised.

By making the consumer equipment affordable, well-integrated with internet technologies, and state-of-the-art in terms of High Definition, Vidanti are pulling in the future just a little bit more and giving the Telcos another reason to give us IPTV now!

www.vidanti.com