Boxed in

Motorola adds spice to digital video with DSL set-top Despite the acquisition and integration of cable industry-leading set-top box maker General Instrument into its product mix, Motorola is no one-trick digital video pony.

That was emphasized when the company announced that Canadian telco Aliant Telecom would use its Streamaster 5000 DSL-based digital boxes to roll out interactive video over DSL in Canada's Atlantic region.

The Aliant market, which has 40,000 potential subscribers, is part of a burgeoning international business and fits a companywide strategy to use Motorola's vertical product lines, said Jacqueline Beauchamp, director and general manager of the multimedia solutions division in Motorola's semiconductor products sector.

"You have markets that are converging and evolving in front of everybody's eyes," she said. "To ignore one over the other is not something that the corporation can afford to do."

Aliant, therefore, became Streamaster's first user. "Motorola is a valued partner for us," said Anthony Archibald, product adviser for digital television at Aliant. "They're a leader in innovation and their in-house experience with set-top boxes is highly regarded by us."

That in-house set-top experience - from the DSL side - doesn't tap the company's DCT line of digital cable boxes or Next Level Communications, in which the company has an extensive investment.

The Next Level product handles three channels of broadcast video and high-speed data and is aimed at the higher-end very high bit-rate DSL (VDSL) market with an appropriately high sticker price. Streamaster, Beauchamp said, is a more modest product with a more modest price in the $500 range. It's aimed at a market that starts with asymmetrical DSL (ADSL) and evolves to VDSL.

While Aliant has an ADSL network, the telco "is advancing our products as we go and truly keeping it on the bleeding edge of the new technology," Archibald said.

Beauchamp's group, meanwhile, is in discussions with Next Level "to bridge and create a working relationship, leveraging their core competency with the strength of our core competency into a very good solution that will excite the customer base," she said.

Both companies emphasize an "end-to-end solution," but Next Level has a stronger headend emphasis, Beauchamp added.

Aliant doesn't use Motorola's end-to-end system. Cisco Systems provides headend gear to receive and aggregate signals and iMagicTV's DTV manager software delivers the signals via a DSL access multiplexer to the Motorola box that "gives the customer television capability, which is similar to cable," Archibald said.

"We're using our ADSL network so customers can choose to have a high-speed Internet connection as well as our VibeVision," Archibald said. "We run a modem to the home."

Beauchamp bristled at the suggestion that the Streamaster is a repurposed Blackbird, a product that Motorola launched prior to the General Instrument acquisition.

"Blackbird was intended as a reference platform. We never moved that up to connectivity to the networks and to the headends," she said. "We moved up the value chain in providing the complete final level of product solutions, which is now known as the Streamaster."

The product, she emphasized, also is separate from the DCT family of digital cable boxes.

While Aliant is the first Streamaster user, it shouldn't be the last, she said.

"Rollouts are taking place outside of North America," Beauchamp said. "If you start looking at what network infrastructure and topology exists from a global standpoint, it's based primarily on DSL and satellite. There's very, very little cable infrastructure that exists."

That demand is moving so much more slowly in the U.S. that there hasn't been any customer implementation yet. "We are in development right now with some of the RBOCs in North America," Beauchamp said.

If that's the case, Motorola could find itself supplying bullets to two competing sides as telcos and cable operators vie for video customers.

"Are we going to be competing with one another? No," Beauchamp said. "We're providing a broader strategy for Motorola to provide product-level solutions into vertical market segments underneath the broadband communications space, which include ADSL, VDSL, cable and direct broadcast satellite. To ignore one over another is not what we're trying to do here."