European Research Update: EU Developments in Digital Living

Parks Associates attended multiple conferences in the latter half of 2010, and we were encouraged by the industry developments throughout the continent. Here is a summary of some of our recent observations, which culminated with the recent CONNECTIONS™ Europe Summit, which Parks Associates hosted on November 15-16, 2010. Visit www.connectionseurope.com for more information on this and future Europe events.

European Service Providers Embracing the Connected Home

The operators in attendance at the Connected Home World Summit in London were from many different European markets - from Greenland, Estonia, Italy, Germany, France, and Russia to countries in between. We came away with the following takeaways from the panels and keynotes:

There are very different takes on the economics of deploying the "God Box"/über-box, which would bring in the functionality of the residential gateway (modem, routing, remote manageability, etc.) along with multiple set-top boxes (tuners, transcoding, server capability, etc.). For reasons related to cost, lifecyle differences in CPE, and the risk of one point of failure, many operators are taking a conservative approach in deploying fully integrated customer premise equipment hardware. At the same time, Intel (which was represented at the event by Brendan Traw) has had early success with some service providers, including Telecom Italia and Liberty Global, in delivering a high-powered gateway that takes on much of the functionality of the über-box.

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