Cable operators wary of advanced set-tops
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(06/11/01, 4:35 p.m. EST)
CHICAGO — As the cable industry gathers for the start of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association show Monday (June 11), industry executives said they are "crazy about going digital," but said their darling is not the advanced digital set-top of tomorrow, but rather the low-end thin-client of today as embodied by such set-tops as Motorola Inc.'s DCT-2000.
Coupled with the current economic downturn, this pragmatic attitude among cable operators could slow the industry's drive to the OpenCable specification, intended to allow advanced interactive set-tops to interoperate, and eventually to be offered for sale in the retail market.
Richard Green, president and chief executive officer of Cable Television Laboratories Inc., said CableLabs' member companies will continue their strong support for the OpenCable initiative. The industry needs OpenCable not only to lower risks for operators and programmers offering future services, but also for political reasons, Green said. "We need to satisfy the government's needs" to make the cable industry open, he said. "For that, [the spec] has to be real."
Speaking at an opening plenary session on Sunday (June 10), Kim Kelly, executive vice president at Insight Communications Inc., said cable operators can already offer "pretty expansive services on DCT-2000 just through software downloads, without a truck roll." In contrast, advanced set-tops such as Motorola's DCT-5000 are "just not an economic investment," she cautioned.
Steve Burke, president of Comcast Cable, agreed. Three years ago, Burke said, U.S. cable operators asked, "Do we do thin boxes now or wait until big boxes arrive?" At Comcast, the debate is clearly over. To leverage the company's upgraded cable plants, "We have to get DCT-2000 out there now," Burke said.
Patrick Esser, executive vice president of operations at Cox Communications Inc., also expressed his company's enthusiasm for thin clients. Forecasting 2002 as "the year of video-on-demand," Esser said, "We have to get more content and boxes out on the market. It will be huge next year."
Such a trend coincides with AT&T Broadband's recent acknowledgement that it will roll out more thin clients rather than the DCT-5000, a full-blown interactive set-top featuring Microsoft Corp.'s WindowsCE-based software.
Multiple fronts
CableLabs' Green, however, said the cable industry is moving forward on several fronts. "We are exploring both ends of the business spectrums — on one end, rolling out fully capable set-tops now, while on the other end, looking for ways to make use of already existing upgraded cable plants and amortize that investment with thin clients." The hybrid fiber-coax plant "gives us more options," he said.
Industry observers noted two major reasons why U.S. cable operators are generally cautious about advanced digital set-tops. The first is cost, and the second is a lack of interactive programming that would require such advanced set-tops. "The cost of the advanced boxes is still very high, while there is really nothing to run on advanced set-tops," said Paul Kagan, chairman and chief executive officer at Paul Kagan Associates Inc., a market research company for media and communication industries.
Michael Paxton, an analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group, agreed. "The one box type in the cable industry that seems to be gathering dust is Motorola's DCT-5000," Paxton said. "Several cable operators purchased a total of about 100,000 last year, but they were never deployed [except for a few experiments] That was due to the fact that most applications for the DCT-5000 were beyond the capabilities of the operators to support. It literally was a set-top box too far ahead of its time."
Motorola confirmed that it has shipped "a little over four million digital set-tops" to the North American cable market since last fall, said director of systems engineering Lawrence Vice. "A majority [of those] was DCT-2000."
The DCT-2000 runs a Motorola's 68000 processor and comes with a basic MPEG-2 main-level profile video processor and AC-3 audio processor. It has a bit-mapped graphics display that ranges from 2-bits to 8-bits.
The DCT-5000, meanwhile, run a RISC processor with better than 300 million instruction per second performance, and features an integrated cable modem as well as an MPEG-2 main-level video processor, AC-3 audio processor, 32-bit graphics and hardware support for 3-D graphics. The box also incorporates 14.3 megabytes of standard memory, but is field-upgradable to 90 Mbytes.
