Explaining the rationale for operator deployments, Sylvain Thevenot, Managing Director at Netgem, points out that set-top boxes are expected to be free, but not necessarily soundbars. “The soundbar has a value, due to the poor sound in thin, widescreen television sets. Pay TV operators see this device as an opportunity to provide something with a perceived [monetary] value to consumers that is much higher than zero. Whereas today, you have to subsidise the whole cost of the STB, this is a chance to pass some of the cost of the equipment to the end user.”

“People are buying soundbars for EUR 150-200,” he adds. “If you give them a soundbar that has a set-top box inside for EUR 99, that looks like a bargain.”

The additional cost to the Pay TV operator of integrating a soundbar element into a set-top box does not come close to EUR 99, Thevenot says, even though Netgem is clearly aiming towards the mid-market for soundbars with its current solution (which sounds and looks good in demonstrations). Thus, the EUR 99 (or any similar figure) that you can tempt out of a subscriber offsets some of the cost of putting a set-top box into their home.

This CPE economics is one of the motivations that has Pay TV providers talking to Netgem. Another is the potential for soundbars to engage younger consumers with the brand, providing a way for them to stream music. “A large part of their listening is streamed, whether it is radio, or from Deezer or YouTube,” Thevenot points out. As you would expect, the soundbar part of the STB can be operated direct from a mobile device, using Bluetooth, so it can be treated as a powerful smart speaker in the corner of the living room.

Pay TV operators that Netgem is in advanced discussions with are also interested in the potential to use a soundbar-enhanced STB to encourage consumers to upgrade their living room device, leading them to re-locate the existing set-top box into another room like a kitchen or bedroom. The idea is that you effectively prompt a move towards whole-home viewing and upsell them to a multiroom service.

This process is triggered by a television set upgrade. “People are buying new TV sets – like thin OLEDs,” notes Thevenot. “You do not bin your old TV. The original lounge television is moved to another room and the existing STB goes with it. The soundbar-STB goes under the new TV in the living room. It helps you sell a multiroom proposition. In a trial, this has proved to be fairly successful as a strategy.”

Netgem, which generally serves the IPTV market with its customer premise equipment, has also been talking to companies that want to provide a pure OTT-play for video services into the home. The vendor is also in discussions with mobile operators who lack fixed line infrastructure and want to build a mobile-first subscription TV experience that uses ‘casting’ to the television set (where the casting goes through the soundbar-STB).

A greater service provider CPE presence inside homes?

The soundbar, alongside Wi-Fi extenders, is an example of how service providers may extend their CPE presence inside customer homes. A Wi-Fi extender could be turned into a digital assistant, given a nice speaker and integration into a conversational ecosystem. That is an obvious way to generate some value-branding, sitting in prime non-TV locations like on the kitchen worktop, especially with consumers who are not wedded to Amazon (Echo), Google (Google Home) or Apple (HomePod, coming next year) hardware – which is surely going to be a large ‘follower’ and late-adopter marketplace.

Sky in the UK and Ireland has already dived into the soundbar market, albeit with a different approach to the one Netgem is offering. As we reported previously, the Pay TV giant has teamed with Devialet, a leading name in audio, to develop and co-brand a standalone product. This will work with any television, but it is also designed to deliver an optimised experience when integrated with a Sky Q set-top box. That is when you get to enjoy ‘Sky Q Sound’ – exclusive sound modes designed by Devialet that automatically refine the audio for a range of Sky entertainment and sports. Sky is selling the soundbar for £249 (if you are a Sky Q Multiscreen subscriber) or £299 (for other Sky subscribers).

We previously reported on concerns that the proliferation of retail soundbars could actually drive a wedge between Pay TV operators and the televisions they need to serve, literally pushing their set-top boxes off the shelf that sits below the television set. That could provide another impetus for Pay TV operators to turn their set-top box into a soundbar that contains an STB. You can read about those fears here.

More on this subject

Sky demonstrates how Pay TV operators can expand their presence in the home with its ‘luxury’ soundbox

Service provider CPE challenges: soundbars that block easy STB access to the TV, and the digital assistant race

Combining the STB, TV soundbar and Alexa means telcos can stand out from the crowd

There is a 5-10 minute discussion about the possibility for Pay TV providers to expand their CPE presence in customer homes in our recent webcast, ‘Using open-source CPE to drive service innovation’. The discussion about future CPE strategies can be found in the first 15 minutes of the one-hour webcast featuring Joel Westin, Product Director at ComHem and Darren Fawcett, VP Technology Solutions at ARRIS. You can listen to the conversation here.

The set-tops are aimed at non-PVR customers. Com Hem is happy with its TiVo PVRs, which are now in 40% of its cable homes, where they have raised net promoter scores – a key customer satisfaction metric. The Android boxes are designed to update the cable TV experience for the rest of the customer base.

On a Videonet webcast yesterday, Joel Westin, Product Director at Com Hem, revealed that the company went open source because it would compress hardware launch cycles and enable faster service/platform updates. It then considered RDK and Android Open Source Project (the base Android code that you build upon) as possible open source solutions but concluded that these would need more internal project management resources than Android TV (which comes with various applications and services pre-integrated).

The main reason for adopting Android TV Operator Tier, however, was time-to-market. Following some important preparations, the open source STB project began in earnest in March (this year) and Com Hem will have what Westin calls a “minimal lovable product” (a play on the term ‘minimum viable product’ that raises the bar for internal expectations!) just 10 months later.

“This means launching with a subset of all the features we would eventually like, but with a product that will be commercially successful. This approach has worked well, keeping down the time needed to get a first version to market. We intend to keep building, adding more functionality over time.”

Westin believes it is easier to adopt this approach – going to market with the minimal viable solution and then improving quickly in the field – when using an open source approach. “We have much more control now over the whole process of bringing the platform to market and making adjustments as we go along.”

He notes how the Scandinavian market [because of fierce competition and a tech-savvy population] has to be very customer-centric. “We ask for customer input and we need to do something with that information – get it into products – on a fairly tight turnaround loop,” he points out. “We felt time-to-market was the key for us, along with the features, and the time it takes to bring out new features, and cost.”

Com Hem was attracted to some of the features that come ready-made with the Android TV platform. The company has taken a calculated risk that any disadvantages from the potential presence of rival third-party apps, which cannot be excluded from the platform, are outweighed by the benefits of being a ‘super-aggregator’ who can combine a range of popular (non-rival) video apps together with the traditional Pay TV bouquet (including linear channels and on-demand).

“There is a fragmentation [of the user experience] in consumer homes; you have to go to separate sources to have all your entertainment needs fulfilled,” Westin points out. “We can add content that may not have been available on our traditional STBs and so capture much more of the total viewing time in front of big screen televisions.”

In other words, Com Hem wants everyone to stay on HDMI 1 and watch their non-Pay TV viewing through its set-top box and user experience. “The launcher UI [in Android TV Operator Tier, the ‘launcher’ refers to the UI/UEX software that the operator controls and which runs on top of the open source stack] will be the default environment and the rest [like apps] will be added on.”

One of the ways to mitigate the risk that rival Pay TV apps will appear in front of consumers is to pre-install the apps you do want them to see, and give them due prominence. Westin admits that the company must wait to see how third-party apps usage plays out in homes. “I would not say we are comfortable [with the risks of rival apps] but we are reasonably comfortable with it,” Westin confirms.

Com Hem would not have considered Android TV if it was not for the ‘Operator Tier’ version, confirming what STB vendors have told us – that this move by Google to introduce freedom of UEX choice was a game-changer. The ‘launcher’ means that the default view you see when going into the set-top box is the operator environment (their user interface).

Darren Fawcett, VP Technology Solutions at ARRIS, which now offers Android TV set-top boxes and remains a firm supporter of RDK, says ‘Operator Tier’ has removed one of the biggest differences between the Android and RDK offers. “A key characteristic for RDK has been the autonomy given to operators – the freedom of choice when it comes to their user experience layer. Android TV has now followed that approach, although it is still a little more defined.”

Fawcett also spoke on this week’s Videonet webcast, ‘Using open source CPE to drive service innovation’ which you can listen to on-demand (free).

“Interest in Android TV began to grow once operators were allowed to put their own experience, and look-and-feel, on there. That is why we are starting to see some operators decide that this [Android TV OS] might be their preferred solution going forwards.”

As we reported previously, a number of major UI/UEX software providers now support both RDK and Android TV Operator Tier. Fawcett confirms that the community of companies supporting these open source platforms will not be a differentiating factor if Pay TV operators are choosing between them. “It is fair to say you can find UX developers to implement in either RDK or Android.”

Com Hem, it should be noted, is a cable operator, which makes its choice of Android TV (Operator Tier version) all the more notable. RDK was originally developed with the cable industry in mind, and all its publicly known deployments are among cable operators, although Fawcett revealed on the webcast that ARRIS has  implemented an RDK project (proof of concept) for a satellite operator. All previous major cable operators to go open source (e.g. Comcast, Liberty Global, NOS, Tele Columbus, J:COM) have adopted RDK. According to Fawcett, telcos have shown the most interest in Android TV until now.

In the Videonet webcast you can hear Joel Westin talk about how Com Hem views its new set-top boxes as another multiscreen endpoint, how the company had to adopt an ‘agile working’ philosophy alongside the move to open source (and how this is viewed as one of the two big outputs from the project, along with the new STB platform), and how the STB project drew on previous multiscreen experience.

Darren Fawcett discusses the different hardware requirements for RDK and Android TV, how open source accelerates innovation, what you need to do – apart from choosing your OS – when implementing an open source project, and why he thinks proprietary middleware will remain an option for operators.

Both executives discuss the trend towards more device diversity and potentially, more managed devices in customer homes, which we are covering in a separate story.

Editor’s note

Com Hem has selected Technicolor for its STB hardware and 3SS as its UEX software provider for the new Android TV set-top boxes. The company will also use Android TV Operator Tier for a new range of ‘zapper’ STBs that will be deployed at Boxer, the DTT operator that it owns, and eventually for a Boxer PVR.

You can read more about the STB and UEX providers who were showing off Android TV solutions at IBC in September, here.

The decade in question was the 1960s, of course – Kennedy set out that vision to a joint session of Congress in May 1961. And McKinney used Cable Congress recently to argue that the cable industry needs a BHAG – and he then presented what CableLabs (the innovation and R&D lab that is shared by cable operators) thinks it should be. This amounts to the delivery of life-changing consumer services built around low-latency connectivity, multi-gigabit networks, virtual reality, augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence.

“The BHAG answers the question of why we need multi-gigabit networks and what people are doing to do with all that speed,” he said.

CableLabs has created a video, which you can watch on YouTube, that shows how a family could live and work a few years from now (and the not-for-profit organisation is focused on the 3-8 year time-frame with its current innovation efforts). A man travels home in a driverless car, checking work files and text messages and shouting to neighbours while the car navigates itself. His wife/partner is in her home office running an interactive remote presentation with work colleagues, who appear to be in the room with her. Graphics are presented in mid-air that can be swiped as if they were on a tablet screen. When she finally closes the meeting, you see how this virtual boardroom is in fact a run-of-the-mill study.

Their teenage daughter is doing her college studies and a hologram projection of Albert Einstein is explaining his theory of relativity with the help of rotating planets that surround him – offering a vision of how augmented reality could make education more immersive. Her younger sister is talking to her Grandma in a meadow, although in reality it is actually her bedroom.

A brother is playing a VR game that turns the entire house into a space station, and slowly the rest of the family join him in this made-up world. The catch-line for the video is ‘The near future – bring it on’.

McKinney highlighted work within CableLabs to reduce the latency of DOCSIS broadband networks, something that is needed to meet the ‘design criteria’ for the near-future vision. “The purpose of the video is to inspire the innovators out there who will be creating the services [of the near-future]. We want them to recognise that the cable network is the best network for them to build their experiences on.”

He said there is already a long line of companies in Silicon Valley that want to engage with the cable industry and talk about how they can build new services, like those seen in the video, on cable. He also invited people to give feedback on the vision to CableLabs and to challenge it if they think it is wrong.

Meanwhile, McKinney noted how the new focus on the 3-8 year ‘near-future’ timeframe follows a strategic pivot at the start of 2016. CableLabs now invests half its money into technologies that will appear in this time frame.

He challenged cable operators to meet needs that consumers have not even recognized yet. He called on executives to be open to outside ideas, even those that seem crazy. He praised the entrepreneurial spirt of the cable industry, “which is made up of people who started from nothing and built businesses and networks by taking very big risks with capital spend.”

Photo: A scene from the CableLabs video, which is designed to articulate the cable ‘BHAG’.

The new solution – called the Netgem SoundBox – is aimed at mobile operators and telcos and was launched on the eve of Mobile World Congress (MWC). The opportunity is for IPTV providers to take the latest home technologies to the mass-market, starting with their higher-ARPU customers, using the proven device subsidy model. Consumers who would not otherwise be ready to pay for a powerful television soundbar could get one as part of their monthly Pay TV subscription.

As Haddad pointed out, televisions are getting thinner and their sound systems weaker and the market for complementary TV audio systems is growing. The soundbar is now a common sight underneath a television. The Netgem logic is that if more people are going to need a soundbar as well as a set-top box, why not combine them?

It sounds like a great idea: the STB becomes a more attractive product and retains its prominence in the home (together with any service provider branding) and watching TV – the core product from any Pay TV provider – becomes more enjoyable in more homes. But most importantly, the service provider could become the touchpoint for popular streaming music services, which are often used outside peak TV viewing hours like when people first get home from work or are cooking dinner. These audio services would be reached via the service provider UI.

The Netgem vision is that a companion device app will provide the user interface for the music services. And in its eve-of-MWC demonstration the company showed how you can transfer a music session from your smartphone to the Netgem SoundBox by effectively casting the stream to the fixed device. The SoundBox demonstrated in London, which is a hardware reference design, had great sound quality with plenty of bass to fill out a large room.

According to Haddad, “We are working with our service provider customers to get smarter software into fewer devices. We are trying to reduce device clutter and complexity and we provide a favourable economic model and a user interface that increases enjoyment of the services.”

It should be stressed that the Netgem SoundBox is a proof-of-concept today but the connected home software specialist said the first customers will take delivery this year. Netgem will work with a selection of OEM device manufacturers and service providers will be able to select the specifications for the soundbar hardware, deciding how they want to segment their consumer market. The new device works with legacy remote controls.

Haddad views the mobile operator market as a good launchpad for the Netgem SoundBox as these companies seek a foothold in fixed home services. “Music is strongly associated with mobile operators,” he points out. Netgem thinks all telcos can use the SoundBox concept to encourage multiple service adoption.

The company has a wider ambition to support smart home services on its software/device platform and integrate those into the entertainment user experience. “We want this to be the central hub of the smart home. We believe the next ‘play’ [in the triple-play, quad-play world] is lifestyle and that you will be taking a lifestyle service from your provider, who will give you access to lifestyle services in a unified way.”

Amazon has made its Alexa cloud-based voice service available for hardware integrations since 2015 and Netgem will take advantage of this licensing to include an advanced voice interface.

Haddad believes the convergence of TV and music content is natural, partly because so much ‘listening’ today is actually streamed music videos. The idea is that consumers will find more of their entertainment through their service provider UI and they will need fewer parallel devices. This fits with a wider ambition at Netgem to recalibrate the television UI so that content is presented not according to how it was delivered (live, DVR, on-demand, OTT, etc.) but by how we want to consume it (movies, kids, music, etc., with each ‘avenue’ of content embracing recordings, streamed video, live, and so on).

Netgem believes the desire for a digital declutter is also strong – there are too many boxes and cables in homes and people will welcome some simplification. “The STB is part of this digital clutter, so we are part of the problem. We had to start thinking outside of the box.” That means literally. With SoundBox, the set-top box is disappearing, but only from view.  In future it could be ‘hidden’ inside a soundbar, which could be as splendid as a telco desires, no longer the ugly duckling in the digital home.

Carter is convinced that consumers across Europe will pay for smart services – with peace of mind being one of the key hooks, whether it is the comfort of knowing that your home has security monitoring when you are away, or that water leaks will be detected or product breakdowns anticipated and hopefully avoided. “People wonder if there is a need for smart home services, and there is a need,” he declares.

Broadband operators must start by simplifying some every day tasks, he argues. A simple example is controlling the heating at home. German homes do not have a central heating thermostat but smart thermostats for each radiator, so this means that remote heating control becomes particularly convenient for a consumer in that country, he notes.

Carter was speaking at Broadband World Forum in London this week, where Alvaro Federico Gallardo Gonzalez, VP for Home Services at Orange, also noted the current low levels of consumer understanding when it comes to the smart home. But like Carter, Gonzalez is still bullish about the future smart home market, predicting that it will be worth $70 billion within a few years, money that will be split between services, devices and installation. “This is going to be a huge market with many players competing within it,” he declared. Orange aims to be one of those players, having already launched services in France, Poland and Romania.

Gonzalez pointed to the potential for connecting homes into services like education, health and assisted living as part of the wider connected ecosystem [which starts to touch upon smart government and smart cities], with narrower services including energy management, home automation and monitored security. He identified ‘comfort’ as an important consumer benefit. It is already clear that there are physical and emotional states (e.g. ‘comfort’ and ‘peace of mind’) that can be ‘sold’ via different service functions.

Orange and Deutsche Telekom agree that trust is a key asset for broadband service providers competing in this new market. Gonzalez highlighted how consumers must trust in the reliability of services when taking home security, assisted living and health services. Carter pointed to concerns about data privacy [which will be amplified as smart services use more data about ourselves and our lives]. “Research shows that Deutsche Telekom is one of the most trusted brands and a lot of that is because of the way we control customer data. This is a strength we can play to.”

Ian Wheelock, Engineering fellow at ARRIS (which provides network solutions and customer premise equipment, among other things, to TV and broadband service providers) also highlighted this service provider strength. Having surveyed 19,000 people around the world for its annual Consumer Entertainment Index, ARRIS found that the three categories of company that would be most trusted to manage an automated smart home were, in order, Internet service provider, home security company and TV service provider. 47% of people would prefer the ISP or TV company to deliver smart home services.

Jon Carter warned that the smart home market is a tough nut to crack for service providers. Deutsche Telekom is now a major player thanks to its unwavering commitment and investment over a number of years and he thinks service providers must harness one of their natural strengths – the ability to cross-sell, bundle and also to subsidize the cost of the hardware.

Hardware is a key battleground and Carter believes operators should use their normal subsidy model to their advantage. His company is also selling hardware products from the likes of Sonos in its larger retail stores. This is having several effects: Firstly, to help Deutsche Telekom take a share of the overall smart home hardware market; Secondly, to align its brand with good-looking devices with some clearly defined functions rather than simply shipping routers; Thirdly, to increase consumer confidence in smart home services and so change the whole perception of this market.

“You move this [smart home services] from a category that is not very engaging, with a piece of plastic, to something that is engaging and which will achieve the [so-called] ‘wife approval factor’.” Carter referred to Strategy Analytics research “showing big pools of cash that we as telcos can capture, and a big part of that is from the hardware.”

To further its marketing objectives, Deutsche Telekom is expanding its sales channels beyond traditional stores like Media Markt and Euronics and into DIY stores. The company is also going to partner with home insurers. One major German insurer will soon start promoting Deutsch Telekom smart home services tied to its core insurance policy.

In terms of cross-selling, Deutsche Telekom focuses its efforts on its (MagentaEINS) quad-play customers, offering discounts on smart services. “Every sales conversation around MagentaEINS tries to push the smart home,” Carter revealed.

Deutsche Telekom is currently investigating freemium models as a way to increase uptake. “We want something that every single broadband customer can get – something they do not have to justify to their partner because it costs EUR 10 – some basic smart home functionality that is free.” Door contacts (for security) are an example of a free product that might eventually lead to paid services (like managed security monitoring).

Carter advises broadband service providers that they need to embed the smart home into all their processes including staff training, and expose customers to the concept at every touch point, including on their bills. Selling smart home services has to be built into sales targets and commissions for regional managers and staff, he says. “The smart home is a key strategic objective for Deutsche Telekom; every store has a sales target, and a smart home display unit,” he told the audience at Broadband World Forum in London.

Hardware is also the gateway (literally) into the smart home, which is why it will be increasingly important for telcos to get their hardware strategies right. According to Carter: “We control the key enabler: the home router. Fixed-line telcos have a unique advantage because they are deploying the broadband gateway into the home. At Deutsche Telekom we ship two million routers a year and from next year every new high-speed router will have IoT capabilities built in.” Among other things, this means including new radio technology that can communicate with devices around the home – including Bluetooth as well as Wi-Fi.

Ian Wheelock at ARRIS emphasized the need for telcos to remain in control of gateway and router functions, as far as possible, as more devices appear in the home. “There are a lot of different players in the IoT ecosystem; lots of ecosystems and suppliers and so many disaggregated ‘point solutions’, so many different temperature sensors or smart light switches, typically with their own small hubs that need to be powered up and paired up on the Wi-Fi network,” he observes.

He pointed to the potential for radio subsystem incompatibility, leading to poor coordination between these different hubs and systems. If service providers then want to take responsibility for the experience inside their broadband home, their customer care teams will need to know more about all these technologies. His final concern is that the devices and platforms that people bring home from shops, and which today provide basic Wi-Fi options, “will start to unload smart home services and take subscribers away from you.”

He warns how third-party IoT hubs that use network address translation (NAT) hide services behind them and therefore isolate the broadband subscriber from the infrastructure of the broadband service provider. He believes the operator home will be threatened by companies like Google and Amazon (via their retail products) as a result.

The solution is to provide the IoT hub yourself and onboard as many of the radio protocols (like Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread and Zigbee) as you need, which is not cost-prohibitive, Wheelock claims. One option is to upgrade the existing gateway and another is to use new peripheral products to bring the IoT capabilities into the home – devices that may need to be added anyway, like Wi-Fi extenders.

Set-top boxes can be used as part of this operator IoT ecosystem and the television (serviced via the STB) could become a display point for the smart home and IoT user interface. Wheelock notes that you can make the UI available on portable/multiscreen devices too, but he reckons the TV set is especially suitable for older people whose eyesight makes viewing a smartphone difficult. You can also use voice support found in some remote controls.

The general idea is that the service provider aggregates the different point solutions within a single device or platform, making services more convenient (for consumers) and easier to manage. This minimizes the chance of Trojan Horse ‘OTT’ providers moving in.

Despite the likely competition in smart home devices and services, Deutsche Telekom’s Carter is convinced that telcos can win big in this new market, partly because you need scale to be successful. And for this reason his company is now willing to make its QIVICON open smart home platform available to other service providers and act as consultants for the roll-out of smart services.

“Our real competitors are not each other but the West Coast [USA – meaning Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, etc.],” Carter told Broadband World Forum delegates. “The smart home and IoT platform is not where the value-add is or where the cash is, and we will hurt ourselves if we all try to build our own. So we are keen to work with others on a common approach and architecture, so everyone can then follow their own paths in areas where they think they can add value.”

Addressing the issue of smart home platforms in general, Gonzalez suggested that there will not be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ service provider platform for this market. He believes a platform built for ‘soft security’ [like pet cameras] and comfort requirements like managing thermostats will have a different QoS and cost profile to a platform dealing in hard security [like alarm monitoring] and remote health care or assisted living services. The former is also more open, designed so that more new services can be added, and the latter more closed, prioritizing the security of the data and communications. “It [the second kind of platform] cannot be hacked and must be really robust,” Gonzalez declares.

How service providers can own the Gigabit home 

If you are interested in how broadband service providers can own the smart Gigabit home, this 7,000 Videonet report considers what is driving demand for Gigabit speeds today, and how service providers will deliver them in the access network and around the customer premise. It investigates how operators can maintain primacy within increasingly complex home networks characterized by third-party smart home / IoT services and retail brands who want their devices to ‘move in’.

The free report includes original insights from ARRIS, TDC, DNA, ABI Research, Ovum, RDK Management, Celeno, SoftAtHome, Comcast, IHS Technology, Machina Research, MoCA, Nokia and ADB. You can download the report here.

Photo: Deutsche Telekom advertises its Magenta smart home offer.

Promoted story

PCCW Media recently upgraded its ‘Now One’ 4K set-top boxes with new software that will significantly improve their performance and the resulting user experience (UEX). The Hong Kong multimedia and entertainment group – and IPTV pioneer – avoided the cost and disruption of deploying new hardware. Instead it installed the Enable software stack from Amino Communications and is implementing its own next-generation user interface, the UX3, on top of it. In time, PCCW will port Enable to its installed base of legacy devices.

Until recently the Enable software was only available on the whole-home gateways and thin client set-tops sold by Amino. Now it can be licensed for use on third-party hardware and PCCW is the second Pay TV operator to take advantage of this development. Cincinnati Bell, the North American telco, is also integrating the software with its legacy IPTV set-top boxes and its own choice of middleware. Once again, the result is improved performance and UEX, including some advanced applications.

“We are delighted to present our subscriber base with a fresh user interface and new media choices without the time-consuming logistics associated with a complete hardware replacement,” Tom Simpson, Chief Technology Officer at Cincinnati Bell, said when the deal was announced in February. His company is reaping additional rewards in the back-office where improved operations are reducing customer care issues.

As Donald McGarva, CEO of Amino Communications, points out, Enable was designed in such a way that it can be ported to a wide range of hardware platforms.. It means operators can update their TV user interface, application and DRM on legacy devices without the cost of new set-top boxes and truck rolls. He emphasizes the high performance of the Enable software, which provides for ultra-fast channel change and very high quality pictures, among many other things.

These software-only wins are a significant milestone for Amino, providing more evidence of how the company has evolved from an IPTV set-top box provider to an all-round TV solutions provider. Thanks to the acquisitions of Entone and Booxmedia last year the company now has (respectively) the hybrid QAM-IP capabilities to support the cable market in its transition to IPTV plus a multiscreen platform that can be used for operator TV Everywhere or direct-to-consumer (OTT) broadcaster services.

The Booxmedia capabilities – now marketed as the Amino MOVE cloud-based TV software platform – include media ingest, encoding, transcoding, DRM, service discovery and CRM integration. The platform is architected to support a wide range of client software solutions, including those supported by traditional middlewares as well as OTT devices.

MOVE is used by DNA Finland for its TV Everywhere offer and in May the Dutch utility company and television provider DELTA migrated its whole OTT solution to MOVE in order to radically upgrade its multiscreen offer.

The Belgian broadcaster RTL is another MOVE/Booxmedia customer, using the platform for its ‘RTL a l’infini’ service, which among other things includes transactional and subscription VOD.

Across its TV markets, Amino provides whole-home hubs and thin clients to deliver Pay TV onto every screen in the home. As further evidence of its growing software portfolio the company also offers a service assurance suite to manage QoE and help to pre-empt customer care issues. And in an effort to help its Tier 2 and Tier 3 customers grow revenues – something that is particularly appreciated by those who are seeing their video margins squeezed – Amino now offers its Fusion smart home software to provision and then manage home monitoring services.

The acquisition of Entone did not only bring a broader product solution; it delivered 100 extra software engineers and the scale to compete with larger vendors. The PCCW deployment can be viewed in this context. Amino is still targeting T2/T3 operators but according to McGarva, this deal shows that the company can meet the needs of the T1 market.

So what has been the impact of last year’s strategic acquisitions? “We see the industry migrating to an all IP/cloud future and that is very closely aligned with our deep expertise and skillset built up over almost 20 years. The acquisitions have given us wider capabilities, a deeper and broader portfolio of products and a wider addressable market,” McGarva observes. “We have more resources and people with which to address new opportunities. It is a very strengthened group. We get more engagements including larger operators who are now on the journey to an IP/cloud future and recognize that we can now offer more than IPTV set-top boxes. People are not just coming to us for set-tops.”

Set-top boxes are still at the heart of the business. In January Amino unveiled its 6 Series range of 4K Ultra HD ready devices with HEVC processing. These include a DVR gateway with dual 720p30 transcoding to support multi-screen around the home, and an accompanying client device. Both these devices include 802.11ac (4×4) Wi-Fi and MoCA networking options.

The 6 Series also includes a hybrid (broadcast and IP) HD HEVC client device and a cost-effective IPTV client. The company now provides the former Entone hybrid devices of course; Vodafone Netherlands recently announced its continued roll-out of these IPTV set-tops for its fibre and DSL-based TV services.

Looking ahead, McGarva expects the majority of gateways and whole-home clients to be thin-client devices, albeit it powerful ones that ensure high availability and which can cope with network latency in an increasingly cloud-centric world. “That will suit us well because we have always delivered thin-client devices,” he declares.

All gateways and STBs will eventually be hybrid in some form and will never be replaced by Smart TVs, he argues. Hard drives will eventually give way to network DVR. Amino’s core T2/T3 market will deploy 4K/UHD but will expect a premium for it and HEVC will provide the bandwidth efficiency to make it possible (and enable them to deliver more HD and reduce operational costs).

McGarva makes it clear that small and mid-sized service providers, including rural North American telcos that Amino has sold into so effectively, are innovators. Some market themselves based on great local customer service and others compete on price, while some make product innovation their priority. All of them have to keep an eye on what the Pay TV giants are doing and find a way to differentiate themselves.

It is a realistic ambition for these smaller providers to offer a TV Everywhere service that is competitive against their key competitors, mainly satellite operators, and wider innovations from the likes of Comcast, the Amino CEO believes. Nobody has deployed the perfect TVE service and most are missing channels or local channels, or catch-up services from important broadcasters, or network DVR. The T2/T3 market can definitely compete on the multiscreen user experience and also time-to-market, he claims.

“Some people still offer mobile services and home services. We can help you deliver a seamless multiscreen service and be a long term partner in IP/cloud service delivery.”

This market has to deliver high quality, as a given, McGarva adds. “Historically, that is why service providers have come to Amino. We are known for the high quality of our products. Our customers do not want engineers in the field repairing and returning boxes.”

With more resources and more software capability, Amino is expanding its partnership role with these small and mid-sized operators. The company believes it can lower the cost and risk associated with bringing new services to market, with TV Everywhere being one obvious example. And more services is precisely what this T2/T3 market is looking for.

As Steve McKay, VP of Worldwide Sales at Amino, revealed this month: “The number one request among our hundreds of customers is to bring them solutions for growing their broadband business, especially for premium services where their high ARPU customers reside.”

In a growing number of cases, Amino customers are keen to exploit their fibre broadband and offer value-add services before third-parties beat them to it. This is leading some of them into the smart home, with an eye on the wider IoT opportunity. McGarva points out: “They have all dealt with the OTT video challenge. They do not want that to happen again in the smart home market – where they provide the broadband, someone goes to their electronic store to buy a security camera and service and then soaks up their broadband before complaining that the capacity is not good enough.

“Service providers want to sell them premium broadband and then offer them home automation solutions as well.”

This explains why Amino has created a smart home software platform that can be used with its existing gateways and set-top boxes and other hardware, like security cameras. Amino Fusion is a hosted service that works across DSL, fibre, DOCSIS (cable) and cellular networks. In August the company unveiled Fusion Home Monitor, which provides service providers with self-installable Wi-Fi cameras and operator-branded mobile and web applications to accompany them.

The camera includes motion detection and records both video and audio into a DVR or the cloud. This whole service is viewed as a churn-buster and revenue generator, with cloud-based video storage one of the ways to monetize it. The home monitoring is integrated with the television service so you can list a camera as one of your STB channels. If the doorbell rings while you are watching TV you can have a ‘picture-in-picture’ pop-up to show you the doorway, for example. This is a capability that ‘OTT’ home monitoring providers would find hard to match.

“The beauty of Fusion is its simplicity, especially compared to past generations of connected home services that involved truck rolls and houses full of proprietary sensors. Fusion Home Monitor is a single device delivered in the mail, allowing consumers to be up and running with a new billable service in five minutes,” Amino noted when announcing the new offer.

McGarva is determined that service providers should remain the portal through which consumers get their entertainment and many broadband-related services. This means providing connectivity into different network types and content services (the PCCW ‘Now One’ set-top box is ultra-hybrid, supporting the Now TV IPTV service, DTT signals and OTT content, including from onboarded partners like Netflix and via Android apps). It also means providing the hub and connectivity for the smart home.

A final piece of the jigsaw, also enabled by Amino, is ensuring the Quality of Service (QoS) to support whole-home TV and smart home services. This requires great Wi-Fi, among other things (thus 4×4 MIMO capabilities in the Amino 6 Series). The company also offers the Engage Service Assurance Platform to monitor the home network and devices. This anticipates trouble and helps operators resolve any quality issues. The more IoT devices come into the home, the more service providers may need this kind of capability.

A recent customer win illustrates some of what Amino has tried to achieve with its acquisitions and new strategy, and the markets it plays in. Ohio (USA) based triple-play provider MCTV is small (with 47,000 home and business customers) but ambitious. It is transitioning its cable services to IP.

MCTV prides itself on great quality services. The company is deploying Amino Kamai 450m and Amulet 455m devices, enabling multi-room video, streaming services and reliable home networking, plus service assurance with Engage. MCTV is also deploying a multiscreen offer called ‘watchTVeverywhere’, supporting mobiles and tablets.

From MCTV in Massillon, Ohio, to PCCW in Hong Kong, everyone needs to innovate and everyone needs partners who have the capabilities and the time to support them. For a growing number of operators, says McGarva, that partner is Amino.

Photo: The Amino Fusion Home Monitor lets service providers offer home control services and monetize the Internet of Things.

Rob Gelphman, VP Marketing and Member Relations at MoCA, says broadband providers with MDU deployments came to the organisation asking for this solution, which is based on the current MoCA 2.0 standard for home networking over coax, and which uses the same silicon. “They are laying fibre all the way to the basement in these buildings. They want to deliver 1Gbps today; that is now the table-stakes. The question is how they take these 1Gbps speeds to the rest of the building and the individual units.”

MoCA dismisses the chances of G.fast over copper or even G.fast over coax providing the answer. “They need high performance and reliability and a solution that is proven, using existing infrastructure. They do not want to resort to something new and untested,” Gelphman declares. He believes this leads to the use of coax rather than existing phone lines running around a building, and it points to MoCA over coax.

Helge Tiainen, who chairs the new MoCA Access working group that was formed this spring, points out that the new specification is not really aimed at the cable market, which can achieve its 1Gbps ambitions using DOCSIS 3.1 all the way into an apartment. For the cable industry, MoCA remains primarily a means to deliver media on the home network. But the new access network standard will be suitable for hospitality environments and commercial buildings, like restaurants and offices, as well fibre providers.

Tiainen works for InCoax, a Swedish company that provides solutions for high-speed broadband over in-building coax. He says the realistic alternative to MoCA Access for 1Gbps broadband is Ethernet, but few MDUs have Ethernet around the building and it is expensive and time consuming to install it, requiring everyone in a building to agree to the works at a cost of EUR 200-300 per apartment.

“If you have to pull new cable, it delays roll-out. Service providers just want to start selling [higher-speed] services to the apartments, whether those people own or rent,” he continues. “In many European countries service providers prefer to sell fibre connections to private homes rather than go after the MDU market because that takes too long.”

Gelphman says MoCA Access is generating lots of interest. “We have been talking to operators across Europe. The market is here, now, meaning that everyone wants to talk now and they want it to happen now. There is a huge market opportunity.”

MoCA expects MoCA Access to be standardized by early next year, anticipating that it can be deployed as a standardized technology in the summer of 2017. The MoCA 2.0 specification that it is based upon supports 1 Gbps broadband throughput. In May MoCA approved MoCA 2.5, the latest specification for in-home media distribution over coax, which can handle speeds up to 2.5 Gbps, and this will be incorporated into MoCA Access.

The assumption that MoCA Access is the only game in town for in-building distribution requiring Gigabit broadband should not go completely unchallenged. G.fast is viewed as a solution for 1 Gbps speeds over copper for short distances. Huawei is among the leading proponents of G.fast and trialed the technology in Panama for two months with Cable & Wireless Communications, although the high average speeds reported were 500 Mbps in the downstream.

Last year at Broadband World Forum, Calix, which provides a portfolio of broadband communications access software, systems and services, was showing live demonstrations of G.fast bonding technology, delivering over 1 Gbps on existing copper infrastructure over distances up to around 250 metres. Speaking this week, Craig Thomas, Director of International Marketing at Calix, said the company is achieving speeds of over 800 Mbps (asymmetrical) in live networks today on existing copper pairs, or indeed, on existing coax. 

“MDUs are an ideal environment for G.fast,” he claims, predicting that future amendments will enable speeds beyond 1 Gbps on a single copper pair over the distances needed for this marketplace. “When looking at other copper technologies, such as existing coax and CAT5, it means that this kind of performance can be realized [with G.fast] at even greater distances. Performance is distance-related but in MDU environments the copper loop length is around 250 metres or below.” 

Huawei claims the honour of having launched the first ever G.fast over coax multi-user access solution with a prototype technology in late 2013. It stated at the time that “by flexibly allocating unoccupied frequency bands for G.fast access, the technology provides a 1 Gbps downstream shared bandwidth to serve up to 32 users over coaxial cables.” 

Helge Tiainen argues that copper lines will have difficulty supporting speeds greater than 1Gbps and he stresses that this is why MoCA is a solution for the MDU market. “Using G.fast over the traditional copper phone lines in real life deployments, operators expect to achieve 500Mbps services. In some cases, speeds close to 1Gbps are achievable at 50 metres.

“Because of distance challenges, G.fast suppliers are considering the use of coax. The G.fast standard uses up to 106 MHz or 212 MHz. This requires a coaxial structure of point-to-point and there cannot be any DOCSIS services running concurrently because this is the same spectrum that is used by cable operators. This spectrum can also be very noisy. Due to the current coaxial structure in Europe, which is a tree-branch structure, it is not possible to use G.fast as it is now specified.”

He adds that MoCA uses the 400-1675 MHz frequency spectrum, with the possibility of using up to four RF channels, each providing 1.2Gbps. “By using this frequency spectrum, MoCA can co-exist with cable TV if MoCA uses the higher end of the spectrum, which uses the full spectrum without the ingress noise problem.”

Noting that G.fast was designed for twisted pair copper but has been trialled over coax, Gelphman also questions whether this technology will achieve 1 Gbps and also deliver the stability needed. “It is certainly not going to happen overnight,” he suggests.

Margaret Ranken, Principal Analyst at Machina Research, which provides strategic market intelligence on the Internet of Things, says there is a danger that the smart home becomes a burden to service providers if all they get is more traffic on their pipes. “I do not think the pipe is what matters here. If you are going to have a comprehensive smart home hub that connects the heating and doors and windows, that is a challenging self-install. Some fire alarms will need professional installation. So the field force that a service provider has [installers and engineers] and the customer relationship are what matters.”

She adds: “People will want to buy different products from different vendors and hope that they talk to each other. The role of providing the central hub for the smart home is still up for grabs.”

In January Machina Research published its latest Strategy Report called ‘IoT Platforms Best Practices’ and stated that it is not the feature-sets and functionality of the platform that offer the key differentiator but factors like support and a robust partner, systems integration and developer ecosystem. A focus on the customer will also be a key differentiator.

Charles Cheevers, CTO for Customer Premises Equipment at ARRIS (provider of broadband gateways, set-top boxes and broadband access equipment, among other things) believes the broadband operator can become the entity that aggregates third-party services and presents them to the customer, even if they can also be accessed through independent apps. This kind of ‘onboarding’ should mean a better consumer experience, and minimise the number of devices in the home.

There is also an argument that the service provider is best placed to have an overall view of everything that happens in the home, and therefore to help different subsystems communicate with each other, leading to a unified user experience.

Lionel Gremeau, Product Marketing Management Director at SoftAtHome, which provides a unified software platform for gateways and set-top-boxes, provides some examples. “Cameras can be seamlessly integrated into the LAN with the right QoS already configured in the operator home gateway. Users can access camera streams from the operator’s television UI to monitor their entrances or see that their babies are sleeping well…The home gateway detects that my son is back home, indicated when his mobile phone Wi-Fi has been seen or a Bluetooth Low Energy tag is detected.”

Operators can use open software platforms within their home gateway to enable the integration of third-party IoT devices, which Gremeau views as a great opportunity. “This will lead towards aggregated services whose total value will be greater than the sum of their parts,” he argues. “This will usher in new revenues for operators, as well as increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn.”

The research firm Gartner says cable, Internet and alarm companies and mobile phone operating system providers are actively creating platforms and ecosystems in an attempt to break into the IoT gateway market. “We predict that the most successful will develop a system that seamlessly integrates with nearly any vendor’s IoT application and is relatively painless to the homeowner. A system that locks homeowners into one specific operating system limits their opportunity.”

Cheevers says service providers must break through siloes and deliver a converged experience. “The opportunity for the operator is to do this better than Google or Amazon could. You need to leverage service provider connectivity.”

Having the ‘global’ view of the Gigabit home means service providers can take up the role of the QoE guarantor. Corrado Rocca is Executive VP, Product Management & Development at ADB, a company that provides set-top box and broadband customer premise equipment and software. He points out: “Operators control the entry point into the house and have the ability to look around it in a way that companies like Google cannot.”

He notes how his customers can use standard protocols to access data on devices that are on the home network and establish a unified view of QoS. “The ability to provide QoS monitoring and management will become more relevant in a world with more devices,” he states. “And if you introduce services like [connected] health then they become critical services.”

Rocca thinks it is important that service providers convey the value of this QoS management to their customers. It may then be possible to monetise the function, like charging a few EURO per month for a ‘Geek Squad’ of trouble-shooters. And he reminds us that video, with its higher bandwidth requirements, will be one of the services that needs QoS management.

Sam Rosen, Managing Director and Vice President, Video, OTT and AR/VR (augmented / virtual reality) at ABI Research, thinks there is another way to monetise QoE management. “There is the expectation that for some IoT services with special requirements, the [IoT] service provider will pay for carriage along with higher QoS guarantees measured in latency, throughput and low error tolerance thresholds,” he says.

The Smart Home and IoT may not bring lots of value to service providers immediately, admits Gremeau at SoftAtHome. “It may just appear to be a medium for gadgets,” he adds. “But it will become part of the all-important fifth play that enables new use-cases to be introduced, some of which will be revenue generating.”

When it comes to wireless connectivity for the IoT, the focus is on ultra reliability and low-latency, rather than bandwidth and that could mean a role for cellular networks. If you are offering eHealth services, it is critical that the hub can connect with someone who may have fallen, and is now immobile in the corner of a house. The stronger the wireless coverage (of whatever kind), the longer batteries in remote IoT devices should last, too.

When designing their gateways, service providers can cover most of the future IoT wireless requirements by supporting a handful of protocols and technologies, like Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee and Thread.

How service providers can own the Gigabit home

This story is an excerpt from the new Videonet report, ‘How service providers can own the Gigabit home’. It considers where the demand for Gigabit speeds is coming from, looks at the access network technologies needed to dramatically increase capacity, and investigates the technology needed to ensure the wireless home network does not become a bottleneck.

The report also investigates how service providers can ‘own’ the home in the Gigabit era – maintaining primacy within increasingly complex home networks characterised by third-party smart home / IoT services and retail brands who want their devices to ‘move in’.

The 5,000 word report includes original insights from ARRIS, TDC, DNA, ABI Research, Ovum, RDK Management, Celeno, SoftAtHome, Comcast, IHS Technology, Machina Research, MoCA, Nokia and ADB. Like all our reports, it is completely free and you can download it here.

Photo: Family enjoying broadband services (courtesy of ARRIS)

The cable industry has delivered compelling and well-priced services and bundles covering television, multiscreen TV, fast broadband and telephony and is currently enjoying the fruits of its labour with some notable growth figures. But now it must look outwards beyond its own retail products and embrace what could be an even bigger opportunity, to become the connectivity provider and the platform provider for the Gigabit society.

These are the sentiments being expressed at Cable Congress in Warsaw this week, where Manuel Kohnstamm, President at the industry trade association Cable Europe (and SVP and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Liberty Global) put it in his own words. “It is no longer just about being the hero of our own story. Now, it is about the opportunity to become the hero of everyone else’s story too.”

Kohnstamm highlighted the importance of innovation – the umbrella theme at the conference this year. And he said the key to future success for the European cable industry is its ambition to deliver Gigabit connectivity and so underpin what is being termed the digital and Gigabit society. He talked of building Gigabit highways and creating a borderless digital world. He believes cable can be a central enabler of a digital society that is constantly adapting to disruption and innovation, connecting people with faster and better digital experiences.

Virtual reality and augmented reality were two of the themes discussed later at Cable Congress – both examples of nascent but potentially massive markets that will rely on ultra-fast and low-latency networks but which also present an opportunity for service providers to become either a platform or a retailer of services or applications.

The role of cable operators in the Internet of Things was also discussed in detail at this conference. Once again, there is an opportunity to become a retailer of smart home services but there was little doubt about where the real value-add can be found: in providing the platform that hosts multiple third-party ‘retail’ services, in providing the trusted and secure environment in which consumers will welcome smart home and IoT applications, and in providing the in-home (and wide area network) connectivity.

In both these examples, the emphasis is on cable operators enabling innovations that they do not necessarily control or sell directly, but which add to the sum total of satisfaction their customers will get from their connected digital lives. The industry is being urged to embrace change, make it work for their business, and keep innovating on their own retail products – like television and broadband access – at the same time.

Kohnstamm highlighted the most recent evidence that the cable industry is getting things right – IHS statistics released by Cable Europe on the eve of Cable Congress showing that cable industry revenues are up 7.1% year-on-year. There is strong growth across all cable services with broadband up 10%, TV revenues up 5.5% and telephony revenues 7% higher than last year.

Television continues to be the main source of profit for the industry, accounting for half of the EUR 23 billion of revenue, according to the IHS figures. Internet represents 31% of the industry’s income, up eleven percentage points compared to a decade ago. 

The revenue growth for TV services is driven by a strong appetite for digital subscriptions and VOD, the IHS statistics reveal. 61% of TV subscribers are now digital and they generate 77% of TV revenue. “With 21 million homes still analogue, the sector has clear potential to continue growing in the future,” Cable Europe says.

More than 4 million Revenue Generating Units (RGUs), the industry metric for the total sum of individual TV, Internet and telephony subscriptions, were added in 2015, taking the total to over 117 million. Internet and telephony are increasingly relevant, contributing to 52% of total RGUs. 

Commenting on these figures, Kohnstamm said: “They show that cable is performing strongly despite – and possibly thanks to – the challenging competition with traditional and over-the-top players. Our industry is best-in-class when it comes to combining variety of offer, quality of content and user interface. Investment in our networks and our dedication to a great consumer experience have been the foundations of this success. And in the future, Europe will continue to be a vibrant market so cable must continue to facilitate development in related industries.”

Matthias Kurth, Executive Chairman at Cable Europe, added: “The increasing appetite for connectivity is a great opportunity for us. Our networks are clearly on track to be the backbone of the ‘Gigasphere’ society. We are best placed to enable this transformation because of heavy investment in our networks and our focus on innovation. The cable industry has the ambition and the ability to drive future technology growth.”

NOS in Portugal is the latest European Pay TV operator to use RDK-V For a next-generation platform, with Liberty Global the most ‘famous’ European user. There is now lots of interest in the initiative in Japan, with Heeb pointing out that the original goal was to deliver a solution that could be used globally. Going global is not necessary for the success of RDK but the additional scale will be “nice to have”, he says. “The more people that utilise the software platform, the more interest it will get from SoC providers,” he points out.

Heeb wants RDK-V to become the prime development platform for set-top box SoC (silicon on chip) vendors. If it is, the expected innovation in silicon will encourage yet more operators to deploy the shared source software. Going global will also mean more features and functions are added to the software, as different Pay TV markets have their own areas of focus when it comes to innovation. New markets like Japan will benefit from all the development wisdom that has been accumulated in Europe and North America.

RDK-V would have to be adapted to very different television standards in Japan. “I feel that RDK-V has met its objective to be a software platform that works on multiple continents with multiple methodologies,” Heeb adds.

RDK-V has had a dramatic impact in the Pay TV marketplace – albeit currently confined to the cable industry – thanks to its open and agile software approach. According to Heeb: “It would be extremely hard for an operator to compete with Web innovation using legacy methodologies.”

RDK-V has not reached a plateau, in terms of delivering gateway and STB software faster and cheaper. There is still more to come. The SoC economics continue to improve but there is also a new focus for SoC and software innovation and that is the all-IP set-top box and gateway device, where some of the ‘smarts’ from a broadband modem or router could be blended with those of the video gateway or set-top box.

This could see the work contained in RDK-V start to merge with the work contained in RDK-B, the common software platform for broadband devices. IP video multicast and the protocols for IoT (Internet of Things) interfaces are the kinds of technologies that will have to be covered.

“Our next big goal is create interest for SoC companies in the transition to all-IP devices and generate volume from the chip companies,” Heeb explains. Once again, he wants the silicon specialists to view RDK as their prime development platform for this increasingly converged type of customer premise equipment. “The beauty of RDK for the SoC companies is that once you have integrated into RDK for the first time, you have done it for everyone.”

There are now 15 million RDK devices in the field, if you include the new RDK-B deployments. As with RDK-V, the broadband version of the software initiative encourages multiple SoC providers and multiple gateway providers, giving service providers more control over their supply arrangements.

Steve Heeb explains: “Today a customer purchases a modem router gateway with proprietary software and if they have 2-3 suppliers they have to deal with 2-3 . software platforms, which are proprietary. They do not know what is going on, and if they want to add a new feature it is very difficult.  By just helping to resolve that, RDK-B offers a strong benefit.”

Heeb thinks broadband CPE will benefit even more from RDK than video CPE when brought onto a common software platform that the service provider can manage. With broadband subscriptions still growing, the potential business benefits are clear. He predicts that the volume of RDK-B devices in the market will grow faster than RDK-V.

Speaking at ANGA COM, where the dominant theme for the show was Gigabit broadband and the Gigabit home, Heeb also noted that RDK-B will make it easier for service providers to diversify the kind of broadband gateways and routers they offer to consumers, including high-end gateways for more demanding customers. This could be important if there is more competition to perform gateway functions.

The arrival of Google OnHub, a good-looking retail Wi-Fi router, probably raised some eyebrows among broadband service providers. Meanwhile, devices like the Amazon Echo wireless speaker – which is actually a personal digital assistant with voice recognition -will raise consumer expectations for the kinds of features that should be in a modern broadband home.

Amazon Echo adds items to your shopping list when you tell it to, answers questions from the Web, plays requested music and sets a timer for your cooking, among many other things, all in response to voice requests. But broadband device ‘agility’ is now an opportunity for service providers, Heeb believes. “They have a huge opportunity to provide a router or gateway with advanced services, like being a Web companion that you can talk to and which will schedule your appointments.”

Some service providers will be happy to be the high-speed data provider only, but others will want to be the IP services provider. And depending on the country, there will be a subset of broadband subscribers who are willing to pay for a good-looking device with advanced services on it, Heeb confirms. “This is an opportunity for operators to keep customers happy and potentially sell them new services.”

Thus a broadband provider might pay the extra money needed for better looking CPE or to have speakers embedded in them, as examples. The money to do this and the time to plan it could come from the savings that stem from using RDK-B. And the ongoing innovation needed to support more complex and retail-like features could be helped by using the common software platform. Heeb points out that software developers can use an RDK-B emulator, go to a service provider and show them an application that is already running and validated on the emulator.

As with RDK-V, service providers can spend less time working on the part of the software stack that ‘just’ makes things work and more time on the parts of the software that deliver recognisable user experience improvements to a consumer.