Monday, August 4, 2008

General

Operators Still Buying Lots of HD and DVR Set-Tops

August 4, 2008 : BY Motorola

Every so often the press latches on to the idea that the set-top is on death row. The notion is absurd for a number of reasons, but to make the point in the briefest of terms I thought I’d disclose the set-top shipment numbers that crossed my desk today for Motorola’s Q2. If nothing else, here is quantitative evidence that the set-top isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Overall, shipments of digital video set-tops grew more than 15% from Q1 to Q2, with particular spikes in both HD and DVR boxes.

  • Motorola shipped 1.04 million DVRs in Q1, followed by 1.32 million DVRs in Q2.
  • HD set-top shipments were at 1.37 million in Q1 before jumping to 2.02 million in Q2.
  • To date, Motorola has shipped more than 78 million digital set-tops total.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of great things happening with tru2way that will lead to certain cable applications being embedded into other CE devices. That’s not a bad thing for Motorola, incidentally, because it means the market for broadband services should continue to grow. But in the conceivable future there will always be a role for set-tops. After all, who wants to buy a new TV for every hardware upgrade?

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General

NBC Olympics Application Not for Metered Broadband Subscribers

August 4, 2008 : BY Motorola

The Olympics is going to be a giant case study in digital entertainment distribution in more ways than one. The latest example? Chris Albrecht over at GigaOM points to a warning notice posted next to the download instructions for NBC Olympics on the Go. The application flags Olympic events you want to watch and downloads them to your computer for later viewing. However, NBC is not recommending the software for people with metered broadband plans. In other words, NBC is worried that automatic downloading of massive video files could put some people over their bandwidth limit, and add up to additional fees from some ISPs.

Just to inject a note of reality here, the NBC warning is probably overstated and certainly only applicable to a tiny portion of viewers today. The NBC Olympics software is only available to US residents, and most (if not all) metered broadband here is happening solely on a trial basis.

That said, the warning from NBC is an important signpost for consumers. Should we start measuring our own broadband use? Do we start planning for the day when we need to pick and choose what we do online? Should 2200 hours of Olympic coverage really be free?

Whatever the answers, and there’s a long continuum of thought on these subjects, it’s abundantly clear that bandwidth demand is only going to continue to grow. Today it’s the Olympics online. Tomorrow it’s 3D concerts on the Web. Good thing operators continue to work on ways to expand bandwidth capacity. Clearly we’re going to need it.

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