No matter what names they use for this, to me it's simply the cable TV networks
morphing into their own Internet TV portals. Functionally, you take today's TVE
and go all the way with it, eliminating the MPEG-2 TS streams and the need for
proprietary STBs.
I doubt that a single solution needs to be agreed upon, btw. Netflix and Hulu
seem to have been more than capable of inventing their own, successful designs.
As long as they use standard IP for delivery, the rest should be up to each web
site designer.
Another question is, will those using, say, Comcast as their broadband provider
be limited to using only Comcast's "virtual STB"? Or will this be where the
different MVPDs compete against one another regardless of the physical network?
Craig will now have to inform them that "there isn't enough bandwidth" for this
to work.
Bert
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http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326526&piddl_msgid=340551&piddl_msgposted=yes#msg_340551
Cloud Service Shrinks Set-Tops
Startup demos virtual set-top on ARM servers
Rick Merritt
5/5/2015 12:01 PM EDT
SAN JOSE, Calif. - The cable TV set-top box could disappear someday if software
developer Netzyn gets its way. The startup will demonstrate its software
creating a virtual set-top box running in the cloud at the NFV World Congress
here.
Netzyn's NzOS software aims to deliver streaming services from the cloud across
a variety of applications environments including Android, Linux and Windows.
Cable TV providers could use the code to shrink a set-top to a dongle or puck
form factor "which can eventually be integrated into TVs, eliminating the need
for operators to manage" set tops, it said in a statement released Tuesday.
The offering is the latest in a long history of efforts around thin clients.
The approach has established a beachhead in business computing and more
recently gotten traction with so-called over-the-top Internet video services
that compete with cable TV giants.
While an interesting use of cloud services, the demo is not the primary focus
of most developers at the NFV World Congress here. Network Function
Virtualization (NFV) got its start at gatherings of mainly European carriers
about two years ago, seeking ways to simplify their networks overloaded with
mobile data.
So far they have developed a set of specs for migrating networking functions
into software that can run on standard x86 servers. But the efforts are still
largely confined to lab experiments and field trials with plenty of work
developing more specs still ahead, said Christos Kolias, a senior research
scientist at the Silicon Valley lab of Orange, one of Europe's top carriers.
"I'm hoping in 2-3 years we will have completed the work and vendors can call
themselves NFV-complaint, although there's no compliance program in the works
yet," said Kolias. "There are a lot of moving pieces, but we are making
significant progress and the industry has been very supportive," he said.
Carriers and their suppliers ranging from AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent to Orange at
ZTE are among the main speakers at this week's event. However, a director of
virtualization and network evolution from the CableLabs, the R&D arm of U.S.
based cable-TV providers, is taking part in three sessions. And indeed these
days the lines between providers of TV, Internet and cellular service are
blurring.
Processor core giant ARM released the Netzyn news as one example of its
participation in the trend toward NFV. The Netzyn demo runs on ARM cores in
servers using an Applied Micro X-Gene SoC as well as a microserver using a
Samsung Exynos 5422.
"Migrating [set top] functionality from a standalone box to a remote server
talking directly with your TV saves significant cost, energy and materials with
no material impact on UI performance," said Karthik Ranjan, director of
operator relations at ARM speaking in the press release. Virtual set tops "will
enable operators to increase average revenue per user through enabling new
services on the TV faster while reducing their overall operating expenses by
using cloud computing and low-latency networks," he added.
The demo is an implementation of one of dozens of use cases for NFV defined by
the working group developing the specs under the umbrella of the European
Telecom Standards Institute.
Intel was an early supporter of NFV, even before the ETSI effort officially
started, seeing the upside for sales of its x86 processors. ARM has been
somewhat less vocal on NFV prior to the Netzyn news, however it and several of
its SoC partners will be making announcements and showing demos at the event.
Like Intel, Broadcom has been active early on in NFV and software-defined
networking and is making multiple presentations at the event. ARM-based SoCs
are becoming increasingly common in communications with chips from AMD, Avago,
Cavium, Freescale, and Texas Instruments among others.
Indeed the drive toward NFV and software-defined networking could heighten
competition between Intel and ARM camps as carriers choose whether to run
services on x86 servers or ASICs and ARM-based merchant SoCs. But carriers are
quick to caution they do not see a wholesale move away from the ASICs and
merchant SoCs in today's switches, routers and other telecom gear.
"It's not like hardware will disappear, its more of a shift," said Kolias of
Orange. "For example, we see hardware-based appliances dedicated to NFV, maybe
for security apps -- we may need something like that," he said.
- Rick Merritt, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, EE Times
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