Nov 20, 2006 12:00 PM,

MPEG-4 muscles into the market

By Ed Gubbins

Set-top pipeline unclogs as a high-definition holiday nears.

Now those SOC vendors are delivering on the promises made years ago, Wymbs said. “They've finally gotten the code to the point that it can decode reliably.”

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Others say encoders (which make the gear that encodes signals into MPEG-4 format, a group including Harmonic) have held things up. “Encoders right now are struggling to get the technology to a price and performance point that's acceptable for not just the customers but the Hollywood studios that provide the content,” said Jon Hayden, senior engineer for Eagle Broadband's line of set-tops. “The hardware prices are high because it's a new technology. And the quality you get out of these is lousy compared to MPEG-2.”

In some cases, timing may have been pushed back deliberately, to add more competitive features or operational benefits to the middleware, either at the carrier's request or the vendor's suggestion. Already behind schedule, some carriers are willing to wait a little longer for a new, improved product.

There's also the combination of thorny engineering challenges to consider. The latest set-tops include a confluence of several new technologies, including IPTV middleware, encoding, digital rights management and new silicon, not to mention VDSL2. And any one of them could cause problems for the others. “You've got a lot of new things coming together for the first time,” said Todd Waters, Scientific-Atlanta's director of business development for IP subscriber networks.

Whatever the reasons for the wait, it's not entirely over. Many of the MPEG-4 set-tops being shipped now lack middleware and “conditional access,” the encryption that protects copyrighted video content from illegal distribution. Tut CEO Sal D'Auria has predicted “improved availability” of Tut's MPEG-4 set-top boxes this quarter but said “popular configurations” of it (with integrated middleware and conditional access) would become “more readily available” in the first quarter of 2007. SA (AT&T's secondary MPEG-4 set-top supplier) has begun volume production and some shipments, with middleware and conditional access integration to follow, based on each middleware vendor's schedules.

“We just now turned the spigot on,” Waters said. “The hardware's done. What's gating cranking up the spigot is we still have software integration needed with the [middleware and conditional access] companies. The middleware's still baking.”

For that, set-top box makers are working with multiple middleware firms such as Microsoft, Minerva and Myrio (owned by Siemens) as well as conditional access vendors like Latens, Verimatrix, and Widevine Technologies. The timing of those integration processes varies by vendor, product and hardware/software combinations — some scheduled for early in the first quarter, some late in the second. Motorola said the SOC MPEG-4 set-tops it began shipping in volume last month include a Microsoft IPTV Edition software client and conditional access activated upon installation.

Meanwhile, some vendors are selling transcoders that convert MPEG-2 signals to MPEG-4. For example, Cavalier Telephone, a competitive local carrier that began deploying early Tut MPEG-4 set-tops a year ago, is now deploying Tut's Astria video head-end to transcode from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. And transcoders, too, are subject to rapidly changing product development cycles. “[Transcoder vendors] say they have a good product now, and they'll have a great product next month,” said Brian Morrow, Eagle Broadband's chief operating officer. “It's a question of how much of that you believe and when you jump in.”

So far, many carriers, AT&T included, are tight-lipped about the new set-tops. The National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, which has selected SA's gear for distribution to its independent telco members, said it only received the new set-tops this month and won't have much to say about them until they've been broken in for a while. Declining to discuss the new gear last week, an NRTC spokesperson said, “These things just arrived.”