HomePNA Blog

Non-debate over G.hn?

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

If you saw Rick Merritt's EE Times column yesterday "Debate breaks out over home net standards; HomePlug group raises issues about ITU G.hn effort" you may have been confused. I know I was. After all, debate didn't just break out. The ITU G.hn group has been constructively debating this for the last two years. And the HomePlug technology companies were in the thick of it along with almost everyone else in the Who's Who of existing wire home networking. G.hn considered a lot of encoding schemes before approving G.9960 (including HomePlug's turbo code which was given very serious consideration for a long time before the group settled on LDPC).

OK, so is LDPC better technology? Well the consensus from G.hn is that it is a better choice for a single all-wire standard. Will it be harder to license than turbo code? Don't think so. The ITU has a strict IP policy (IP as in Intellectual Property like patents). Companies with relevant IP have to sign a document stating that they will or will not license it. The owner of the LDPC incorporated into G..9960 has recently agreed to license it. Concern resolved.

Is a new standard over powerline bad for the market? You could make a similar argument about G.hn not being interoperable with the millions of HomePNA devices deployed over coax. But, and it's an important but, we set out to create a single world-wide all wire standard. It was apparent from the beginning that interoperability with existing technologies wasn't practical if we wanted to succeed so a coexistence path with existing technologies was chosen as the best long-term solution for the industry. And it worked.

A Little Game of Television Domination

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, director of HomePNA Marketing and PR

All of those analysts out there that predicted that cable would dominate the telecoms when it came to the delivery of video services can get ready for a slow, but-ever-creeping-up coup. News out of Stifel Nicolaus, a research and investment firm, knocks out the notion like a painful sucker punch. The firm reports that for the first time, the growth of video customers should outpace the telephony gains among cable companies. We imagine executives at AT&T and Verizon, who largely view the cable MSOs as the television competition rather than each other, have already broken out in a triumphant dance of conquest. To add excitement to thrill, the report also suggests AT&T and Verizon will continue to take a nice bite out of their conquered market share over the next few years. Oh yeah, it’s good to be the conqueror!

Widgets and TV - Who Would Have Thought

By Rich Nesin, General Manager and Resident Philosopher, HomePNA

Did you see the blog from Verizon about opening their FIOS TV platform to independent developers? Well, we’re excited! Why? As we’ve mentioned before, Verizon uses cable TV technology for its television service (unlike most North American telcos including our favorite son AT&T that offer IPTV based TV service). Like the other telcos, however, Verizon does use IP over a home network for other services like Video on Demand (VoD) and of course Internet access.

So what’s the big news? Verizon is “opening up our widgets platform to outside developers so that FiOS TV customers can benefit from their creative ideas”. A widget is a portable chunk of code that runs on its own – a little application that provides a function that can be added to one or more different software platforms – platforms like browsers and now … FiOS TV. Today Verizon provides weather and traffic information on FiOS using widgets but they recently demonstrated a couple more – ones that add Twitter and Facebook onto the TV screen in ways that enhance their value.

Sound like the ever evolving browser on your PC? It should. With home networking and IP integrated into the set-top box, television viewing can evolve quickly as well further blurring the differences. By offering a Software Development Kit (SDK) to third party developers, Verizon is opening up the FiOS platform to a lot of creative software development minds.

“Social-Media-Ize”

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, director of HomePNA Marketing and PR

Now we could be going out on a limb with this one … but the growth of IPTV and the rapid explosion of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In) has us wondering how it will all tie together? And it mostly certainly will. You can’t have to two popular and somehow connected media that don’t converge together. So, we’re going to be futurists here and suggest that in the next five to 10 years as IPTV proliferates and social media continues to explode, a merge of the two can’t be far behind. We’ve already mentioned our expectation that digital broadcast television and the Internet will somehow find themselves coupled like a yin-yang marriage where the opposites have learned to not only coexist but do so with an energetic harmony that somehow makes sense. Now toss in the obsession that has become social media and you have the makings for a new generation of ultra social couch spuds ready to launch into cyberspace and meet all of the people they may have only said “hi” to once in an elevator. We are curiously on the verge of something truly interesting that will impact society and culture in some unexpected ways. And HomePNA intends to be right in the middle of it as the potato soup du jour providing the necessary standard to distribute all of this wonderful home entertainment to every room in the house. So, here’s to your “social” spud lives!

Not Just another “Jack” in the Box

By Michelle Gamble-Risley, director, HomePNA Marketing and PR

If you think about IPTV as just another form of television entertainment, then you should realize that’s the equivalent of giving bored couch potatoes just another channel in their selection of thousands. At HomePNA we’ve touted the value of IPTV as being the “I” and the “P” part of the equation. We believe it would be a monumental mistake on a par with the thought that “video would not kill the radio star” to believe that integrating the Internet into the television-watching experience will not have a huge impact on subscriber rates.

“IPTV operators and other TV service providers don't want to be known only for delivering TV content to TV appliances,” according to columnist Dan O’Shea over at FierceIPTV . Well, of course not. Why be just another “Jack” in the bazillion of TV boxes out there? Makes no sense and also begs the question, “What’s the point of adding the IP part if not to bring online goodies into the TV’s capability?” A slow merge of TV and online media seems inevitable when you think about it. Don’t you want to be the next cool kid with the thousand of online channels to search, query, watch and enjoy? Of course you do.

So, big telco providers like AT&T U-verse and Verizon FIOS (even though Verizon doesn’t use IP for TV, it does use it for video on demand) with three screens IP strategies already prepared to pounce on the situation will be way ahead of the pack (and so will HomePNA!). So, we can all hum “IPTV killed the DVD star!” Hmmm… or maybe that’s Blue Ray (ouch). We agree with Mr. O’Shea that one key to getting there is transcoding – a multi-syllabic term for changing the way the data from different sources is encoded (MPEG 2, MPEG 4 etc) to allow it to be displayed by the set-top box -- which can be done at the distribution network’s head end, in the residential gateway, or in the set-top box itself. Which is another story.