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The Intel® CE 2110 Media Processor Helps HwaCom Systems Create New Opportunities in the Digital Home

From today’s focus on basic IPTV and pure video on-demand, we are about to see the deployment of many more value-added IP-based services delivered into the living room.

What are these services? That will depend on the region of the world you are working in and the preferences of individual customers. But we can safely say that consumers will begin to use their televisions for new interactive services including personal voice and video communications, games and, here in Taiwan, karaoke.

Let me provide an example. As you know, interactive Mahjong is a very popular game in Taiwan. This is an excellent example of the kind of interactive service that has been quite successful on the PC and is now about to add value to the IP set top box. One interesting aspect is that with enough processing capability on the box, a popular gaming application like Mahjong can be enhanced with set top box-based video phone capability that lets you see and converse with the other players. This shows how complementary applications can provide more fun and interaction for users – and new revenue opportunities for the service provider.

HwaCom Systems is now supplying set top boxes based on the Intel® CE 2110 Media Processor for deployment. These IP set top boxes will support HD video (H.264/MPEG2) and other value-added features. The 1GHz processor core of the Intel CE 2110 Media Processor will enable service providers add new services in the future without replacing the set top boxes.

In the case of an interactive Mahjong application, the 1 GHz processor core of the Intel CE 2110 Media Processor provides the video processing performance and the power to run the game itself, in addition to processing video streams. We are involved in 2D games now and are looking toward 3D games. Continuing innovation in new processing-intensive services will accelerate the demand for even more CPU power.

Another example is EPG navigation and browsing. Consumers want a rich and intuitive experience – and they also want it to be responsive. If processing power is insufficient, the responsiveness of the set top box will not meet user expectations, and this will create a barrier for consumer acceptance.

Today’s home users have definite expectations, based on consumer electronics devices and fast PCs, and meeting these expectations is essential if we as an industry are going to achieve consumer acceptance of new services. So in this respect, adding processing power to the set top box not only supports the addition of more services, it makes the overall experience smoother and more user-friendly.

As we look at silicon development through 2007, we see most vendors of set top box silicon focusing on IP video. While this is an improvement, it represents only a small step when you consider what is possible. When we compare the Intel CE 2110 Media Processor platform to the others, we see a more powerful application processor with headroom for value-added applications and services that also enables excellent video quality.

The Intel CE 2110 Media Processor has another important advantage for us. It is a flexible platform we can build on to implement a variety of different set top box configurations. This re-usable common platform can help our service provider customers reduce their operating costs.

Here is an example. One of our leading telco customers currently has five different set top boxes in service, and all are based on different platforms. For this service provider, the need to support all of these different platforms definitely adds to their overall operating expenses. The use of a common platform based on the Intel CE 2110 Media Processor will enable us to integrate multiple configurations – from entry-level platforms to advanced set top boxes designed to support a variety of service deployments and bundling opportunities at lower cost.

We are seeing a great effort from Intel to make the platform as flexible as possible. The developer ecosystem is something that Intel promotes far more extensively than other silicon vendors.

As a system integrator, HwaCom benefits tremendously from the time-to-market advantages of engagement with developers within the ecosystem who are porting their solutions to the Intel CE 2110 Media Processor.

HwaCom is taking the lead in working directly with developers to integrate solutions on the Intel CE 2110 Media Processor, including the user-friendly electronic program guide and interactive applications based on Flash* and Java* Virtual Machine. Software vendors who have been porting their applications to different silicon are eager to see the Intel CE 2110 Media Processor enter the market, because the platform can enhance performance and fulfill expectations of better interaction with new applications, such as 3D interactive online games, TV chatting, video phone, multi-view sports programs, 3D advertising and shopping, and interactive on-line gaming.

When it comes to quality, seeing is believing. We have integrated solutions on different set top boxes, and when we deploy software on the Intel CE 2110 Media Processor we see vastly improved response time. When our customers see this response time for themselves, they tell us that multi service IPTV is an idea whose time has come.

While the set top box is the endpoint, the root cause of quality issues may not be the box itself but elsewhere along the chain. The Intel CE 2110 Media Processor also helps us provide a better mechanism to ensure video quality with diagnostic tools that let us better configure network elements.

We are working with service providers to define the mix of services that different consumers expect, and the answer is often cultural. What may be an entry-level set top box in one geography may not apply in others. For example, karaoke on demand is considered a basic service in Taiwan, but it is not so important in Europe or North America, where on-demand video is still the primary focus. The growing demand for HD video is another platform driver. The Intel CE 2110 Media Processor platform provides the flexibility to provide MPEG2 and H.264-based video processing with karaoke.

Our service provider customers want room for future upgrades, such as VoIP and video conferencing, without the need to replace the client hardware. And after years of trials, IPTV service providers now realize that they do not need the platform to support every available feature. Many users simply want basic video applications. So service providers can often ship set top boxes with a basic set of services enabled and let subscribers upgrade from there.

It greatly improves ROI from several different aspects. As I mentioned, shipping a common Intel platform in a variety of configurations to fulfill different needs reduces the CE investment, as well as operation and maintenance costs, compared to using a different platform for each application.

Supplying exciting and innovative services increases average revenue per user and reduces the churn rate, improving ROI. This is especially true for IPTV carriers.

The digital home is more than IPTV. We envision a digital home environment that empowers users with a broad array of digital services to access any content, any time, and anywhere on any device. We will see increasing innovation on a variety of networked devices including set top boxes.

Intel’s vision is quite complementary to ours. HwaCom is looking for more than platform features and performance. We are looking longer-term, and looking at how we can help our customers make money from the digital home environment. With Intel, we are choosing an industry player who can help us achieve these objectives.

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