Page 29 - The Channel Issue 2 2010

that master all the elements that you need to produce a digital TV product - from the very lowest level, software drivers, through the middleware all the way up to the user interface, which combined with the performance of the box actually delivers the consumer experience. So you mix all of those things, add in the pay-TV expertise and that is basically what we do. We provide open standards based solutions so that you can have applications developed by anyone but we take care of all the trouble of integrating the software inside the set top box. We don't actually manufacture set top boxes, we outsource that. Our core activity is making it all fly perfectly.

This has been in hybrid – nowadays more than 80% of everything we do is hybrid, i.e. the blend of broadband and broadcast. Of that the high end side, HD hybrid and DVR is now more than 85% of our business.

In terms of growth by transmission type, cable has done pretty well for us over the last year, as well as terrestrial and satellite. The only thing that has been a little bit negative has been IPTV given the struggle of Telecom companies during last year’s recession. But if IPTV can deliver an HD on demand experience to compete with cable or hybrid satellite or hybrid Freeview

If we were just an STB

manufacturer, we could just pass through the 3D video and do nothing with it. We have taken a different approach. With a little bit of advanced maths and some very interesting optimization of the graphics routines we have made our Carbo™ user interface really look as if dialogue boxes pop out of the screen – and the rotating carousel of icons that we have in there actually rotates out of the screen and back into it, to give a full 3D experience for the consumer who has taken the 3D plunge. There is one other interesting feature I should mention about our Carbo interface, it's a technology called SmoothView™. SmoothView gives you complete control of the speed at which you play back your content on your DVR. And the really cool thing is we do that with the audio pitch-shifted so that you still understand what is being said. Say you are pressed for time and you need to watch a football match, you can do this at 1.5 times or even 2 times normal speed but still understand the commentary. That's a unique proposition from us.

certified with the DLNA home networking standard supported by all the big players. Our products can be DLNA servers which means we can take content and forward it on within the home, so for example if you are watching a TV show downstairs and want to see the end upstairs in bed you can move that piece of content to the screen where you are, even send it to your iPhone.

For consumers on the move, the vision we see is that together with the network operators, we'll find ways, no matter where you are, to enable you to watch your TV or access the applications and content you want. Imagine what it would be like if you could connect from your laptop into your home DVR and watch your favourite series in a hotel room somewhere abroad. As broadband gets better you can upload content directly from home, or the network operator provides a service where the content is sitting in the cloud for you and you can access it directly from your laptop. Ultimately you should be able to ask for things to be recorded from your mobile phone, and be able to watch this content on your phone.

It depends where you are and also on what level of bandwidth you have.

Some operators are already deploying multi-room DVR, and you see things like the 'TV Everywhere' initiative in the US which gives a subscriber to a cable TV network access to that network regardless of where he/she is, over the Internet.

What I would really like to see is for the industry to embrace open standards and start working together so that we can actually deliver the cloud based services we'd like to and make life easy for the TV viewers. We'd like digital TV to be really cool. We are doing what we can and we'd like the others to join in.