Huw, can I ask you a question. Cable operators have long championed for interactive functionality to stay at the cable head-end and only putting a fairly passive device into the homes. Can IPTV be a stronger tool than that?
Huw Price-Stephens, Amino
We think of the devices we build as being more sophisticated than those that you would have with a traditional TV service. What we do is put in place a piece of hardware that we know will have to live in the home for three to five years, knowing that the software on that box has to be updated fairly regularly because the expectation in the IPTV world is of new services, new features, new types of content and even the possibility of a new Conditional Access system coming into play. All this potentially must be allowed for in the device that we are building and that clients have spent money on and deployed into the network.
In the IPTV space, we are delivering technology that incorporates a great deal of flexibility to accommodate the unknown. What we expect to happen in the conventional TV space is already visible through hybrid boxes, and the cable industry itself is looking at moving towards a more IP-centric mode of operation in order to just be able to use the bandwidth that it has available and which works more effectively in targeting services. Over time even conventional TV STBs will move up the slope to a more sophisticated mode of operation but in the IPTV world, you have to be there on Day One because if you put in something that has a very limited upgrade path then it is unlikely to cater for the evolving demands of customers.
Chris Forrester
Your view suggests a more sophisticated box at the customer premises?
Huw Price-Stephens, Amino
There is always a role for a simple box because you can replace things that you do in the box by being more creative in the network whether this is in the head-end or on the edge of the network or perhaps re-purposing content within the network on the fly. But this for me is part of the general discussion, and it might apply to a phone or a PC or a TV, where there is a range of categories of device and you will have simple media or you might have more robust media that has greater flexibility which allow a multiplicity of services to be delivered that need not necessarily come from the primary service provider's head-end.
Chris Forrester
Paul, you at Pace can supply anything to anyone but where do you see the industry moving in this area?
Paul Entwistle, Pace
If your question is asking whether the PVR is dead, then I would strongly disagree with that. It is a trade-off between the number and amount of services available for end users and the amount of storage capacity, and different tiers of services will require different amounts of bandwidth. You can imagine with a couple of Terabytes in a PVR, you might have a fortnight's worth of TV, but this is not enough for ‘catch up' TV so in our view there will always be a blend of services which require both hosted and local storage capacity. I see the PVR's role as being very strong and here for some time to come.
Chris Forrester
What's happening to chip set prices?
Paul Entwistle, Pace
We are in the technology business and we know that price erosion is part of the natural way that business runs and is also an important part of the way that our products can be rapidly taken up by our customers. If you look at the take up of High Definition, in both PVRs and regular STBs, this now accounts for almost 50% of our revenue at Pace. So there is a massive migration towards High Definition and this is reflected by pressures that we put on our suppliers (to reduce component prices).
Ian Valentine, Miniweb
The interesting question there was about PVR versus networked resources. It might be worth decomposing that a little, and looking at STBs because in its simplest form, a box is a tuner and a decoder, a way to receive video and to decode the signal. And you can then have storage in the middle of it and in time there is a bus that ships things around. Then you get STBs with two tuners and maybe boxes with two decoders which can shift content from the decoder to another device. Pretty soon you might come to the conclusion that the bus inside the device is actually the network and why not have some storage on that network and any number of tuners on that network and any number of decoders on that network? Why not put a control system onto the network? And you might then come to the conclusion of asking why is it MY network, why isn't it the network's network? Why not have storage on the network instead of having storage locally?
So Paul is exactly right, it is always a trade-off between the bandwidth you have in the home and the facilities needed in the home and what sort of distribution architecture you build onto that home device. But the standards don't exist just yet that allow you to decompose these various elements in the STB, hence the limitations in today's technology but fundamentally the home network is the place where you store the stuff you own as a consumer and the supplier's network is where material is stored that they sell. There will be rights that limit what you can store on a home network and I see these rights limiting the amount of material stored on a home network which suggests to me that the PVR in some forms or other will always be present in the home.
