CHICAGO - Silicon vendor Broadcom and systems integration vendor S3 Group are taking divergent routes to essentially the same goal: eliminating some of the clutter that happens when cable operators start delivering multiple content to multiple end user devices.
Broadcom's doing it on the base level with a new DOCSIS system-on-a-chip (SoC) that coalesces the proliferation of advanced services and devices subscribers are attaching to their cable systems.
"Cable operators are buying set-top boxes and putting them in as gateways that have four, six, eight individual tuners in the home," Jay Kirchoff, vice president of cable broadband marketing at Broadcom told FierceCable. "We're offering them a device that allows those multiple tuners to be replaced with a single device using technology we call Full Band Capture."
The trick, he said, is to digitize the entire 50 MHz to 1 GHz spectrum then use digital tuning to recover the signals and eliminate up to eight individual tuners with a single device.
S3, meanwhile, has developed a test automation system to address that the content is being delivered to a defined set of users with an appropriate level of security via an end-to-end content delivery validation and to improve the ongoing operational efficiency challenge customer service representatives face as the MSOs roll out multiple services to multiple devices.
Complexity is something S3 welcomes, John O'Brien, the company's CEO told FierceCable because "those different contents--linear versus interactive versus on-demand--all have to be brought to a consumer and be checked and validated that it's arriving correctly."
For more:
- see this news release
- and this news release
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