[opendtv] Designers struggle to turn on Internet TV
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:15:26 -0400
This is certainly one of the better articles I've ever read on the
topic. It balances out the promise against the obstacles. No hype.
Bert
-------------------------------------
Designers struggle to turn on Internet TV
Rick Merritt
(07/18/2007 6:53 PM EDT)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201002155
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Computer, set-top box and Web companies share a
vision of a system that brings consumers in an easy-to-use way the
rising wealth of video on the Web. But thorny technical problems that
stretch from silicon to software hamper efforts to design successful
Internet TVs.
The Web lacks the quality of service expected for television viewing. It
spawns a rapidly changing array of codecs and rights-management schemes.
What's more there are no dedicated chip sets, applications software or
open Web video portals to guide an iTV system.
Nevertheless, many designers hold fast to a belief that the Internet
will be the future of TV. Detractors say big cable and telephone
carriers-not Web TV wannabes-will define the future of television.
"Networked TVs are coming, and all consumer electronics guys will
eventually make them," said Leonard Tsai, a senior consumer systems
engineer at Hewlett-Packard Co., speaking at the Internet Television
Technology Conference here Tuesday (July 17). Nevertheless today, "there
are so many uncontrolled variables, it makes hard to develop networked
TVs, and they are not a very friendly user experience," he said.
"Internet TV is probably going to outstrip telco TV eventually," added
Paul Fellows, another presenter and chief technology officer for Amino
Technologies plc (Cambridge, England) which makes set tops for telephone
companies providing TV service.
"The lack of a quality-of-service standard is probably the biggest
problem we have," said Fellows.
Closed telco networks can get packets delivered predictably with
latencies of 300 milliseconds, a fact that lets them squeeze memory
buffers in their set tops to tiny proportions. By contrast, the Internet
TV set top Amino designed uses buffers that handle up to five seconds of
video, a maximum users find acceptable, he said.
Engineers also need an open standard for how they can find video on the
Internet.
"There seems to be a myriad of ways of embedding video into a web page.
I am sure every programmer just makes up their own way," said Fellows.
"If we could get an HTML standard for embedding video on a web
page--that would be super, especially if it includes a text description
of the video," he added.
Another major hurdle is developing a box that is low cost yet powerful
and flexible enough to support an ever-changing array of codecs and
digital rights management (DRM) schemes.
"There seem to be new codecs every day and they appear to change at Web
speed," said Fellows. "I don't have the human resources to track all
these new codecs and their changes. It evolves so fast," he said of his
120-person company that has delivered more than one million set tops to
date.
Just among video codecs, MPEG2 is used for most DVD and cable TV
content, but both platforms are migrating to MPEG4. Some Web video
services use proprietary codecs such as the one in Adobe Flash.
Microsoft recently announced its own Flash-like product called
Silverlight. Others use H.263 and motion JPEG. Personal content
sometimes uses the DV codec.
"The content is fragmented in many different formats and devices have to
support them all," said Bhupen Shah, the chief technology officer of
Sling Media.
Sling's box tries to decode any incoming stream and its DRM, then send
it on in whatever format a receiving device can handle. When possible,
the box converts streams to analog before re-digitizing them for
transmission.
"There are too many business models at play to have interoperable DRM at
this point," said Ken Morse, vice president of client architecture at
Scientific Atlanta, now part of Cisco Systems.
The company develops its own ASIC for set tops that now includes eight
cores including dedicated blocks for encrypting and decrypting AES
traffic to handle DRMs, Morse said.
"The silicon vendors don't understand the DRM problem correctly. All we
want is a place to store a root crypto key safely in a chip," said
Fellows, frustrated by chips that also build in video processing
capabilities he doesn't need.
"There are no dedicated network TV silicon solutions today," said Tsai
of HP.
For its Media Smart TV, HP took the approach of using a variety of chips
aimed at networked DVD and telecom systems. Software from the various
vendors did not blend together well and they required independent blocks
of memory, creating extra costs, he said.
However, that approach was better than using programmable DSPs or-worse
yet, VLIW processors that appear in some systems. Those solutions are
difficult to optimize for all the very different media and control
functions they handle, Tsai said.
"It's perpetual job security for the software guys," he said. "In
general people with consumer, computer and chip experience are very
rare," he added.
A representative of Texas Instruments said the company is currently
seeking feedback on its plan to make a single-chip version of its
two-chip DaVinci chip set aimed at Internet TV systems.
Cable TV and telephone carriers rolling out managed networks for
television have the advantage in quality, said Morse of SA. Their target
is to have no more than one picture defect in every two hours of
viewing, and two-thirds of all carrier set tops now shipping already
support high definition TV.
Their latest set tops also support IP downlinks at about 10
Mbits/second, a figure that will go up to 120 Mbits/s in the next
generation. Morse said carriers will bridge "best of the Web" content on
to their managed systems. The Open Cable Application Platform, a
software stack developed for cable TV operators, is now being deployed
and will be a foundation for Web content, he added.
What the carriers lack is the full breadth of Internet content. Apple
Inc. tried to strike a balance with its Apple TV that requires pulling
content from its large, but limited iTunes service via a Macintosh
computer over Wi-Fi. To reach out to the broader Web, Apple cut a deal
to make YouTube available over Apple TV.
Carriers have their own fragmentation issues with the proprietary
electronic programming guides (EPGs) used by different carriers and
middleware companies.
"The standardization is very good for video streams on telco networks,"
said Fellows. "The proprietary parts come in with DRM, conditional
access and EPGs," he said.
"There's a huge non-standard meta-data environment in telco TV networks
that needs to shake out. That has held them back a bit," Fellows said.
All material on this site Copyright 2007 CMP Media LLC. All rights
reserved.
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