Parks Associates Analyst Presents at Multimedia over Coax Alliance

Brett Sappington, Senior Reseach Analyst at Parks Associates will be presenting at the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA).

MoCA is hosting an interactive workshop being held at TelcoTV in Las Vegas, on Tuesday, November 9, from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Speakers and case study presentations will feature pay TV operators and integrated service providers including Verizon, Comcast, Cox and DirecTV. Parks Associates will provide an overview of integrated service provider and pay TV market trends.

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TiVo Joins MoCA

The company that pioneered the concept of whole-home DVR has hung its hat with the Multimedia over Coax Alliance.

Cable Europe Parties Like its 1999

Remember the lavish, luxurious corporate functions frequently hosted by technology companies in the roaring 90’s? Tonight the European cable industry celebrated a solid year of nearly 10% growth (at least Telenet enjoyed nearly 10% growth) in an otherwise lackluster economy. The party, hosted by Telenet for delegates of the European Cable Congress in Brussels, felt more like a coming out party. The IT industry’s fascination with IPTV has finally quieted as IPTV growth has slowed over the past year and cable, evidently, has decided it is time to come out and celebrate. Perhaps the byline of the event should have been “the demise of the cable industry in Europe has been greatly exaggerated.” Telenet spared no expense, renting out the Belgian Bourse, an elegant Palladian style building – quite possibly symbolic of the solid returns the company is providing its shareholders. In cocktail conversation, a member of the Cable Europe trade association stated that ICT has become one of the most significant contributors to the EUs GDP. That would explain the guest appearance of Belgium’s Prime Minister, Yves Leterme.

The distinguished guests at the event included one of the FCC’s lead economists working on the U.S. Broadband Plan which will be presented to Congress this month. Other notables were the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) team, the sales team of the steadily growing digital rights company Irdeto, some familiar faces from OpenTV, Broadcom, management of Liberty Global and subsidiary UPC as well as the majority of European cable providers.

To further celebrate not only cable-pride but also Belgian-pride, Telenet served not only the gamut of Belgian champagnes and beers, but trotted out cuisine from two of the country’s most famous chefs, top chocolatier, and award winning latte artist (he creates images in the milk floating atop your espresso). Later in the evening the party featured fashion models sporting outfits from Belgium’s top clothing designers, and finally the pulsating sounds of Belgium’s top DJ.

When IPTV World Forum opens in London on the 23^rd of this month, will we see the industry hosting such a bold celebration of success?

Sigma buys CopperGate - going head-to-head with Broadcom?

Sigma Designs is building quite a home networking portfolio. First, there was the acquisition of Zensys, and now today an announcement of their purchase of CopperGate, they look like they're going to go head-to-head even more with the likes of Broadcom in the advanced gateway, set-top box, and connected CE space, as Broadcom is a big proponent of MoCA.

U.S. cable operators jumping on the multi-room DVR bandwagon

After seeing virtually no activity in the cable space regarding multi-room DVR deployments, there were a number of announcements at the Cable Show a few weeks ago that indicate that things will heat up soon. Bright House, Cox, and Time Warner Cable are all expecting to deploy this year. This is good news for Entropic , which will supply the chipsets to enable the networked set-top boxes.

Entropic showing MoCA-to-Ethernet adapter from NETGEAR with MoCA

This is a practical application. Entropic was showing a demonstration with the NETGEAR MCAB1001 Ethernet to Coax Bridge (ECB) kit, powered by its c.LINK MoCA technology, in live demonstrations with the VUDU HD Internet Movie Box at CES.

Some additional notes regarding P1901 and ITU 9960

I followed up with some of the principals involved in the IEEE P1901 and ITU-T G.9960 (G.hn) work last week to clarify a few points. These requests followed a briefing with the folks with MoCA, who have grievances about the ITU process and the decision that was reached in December to approve the foundation document. Here are some of the primary issues that the MoCA folks wanted to air:
1. They note that this is still an uncompleted specification, noting that no MAC agreement has been reached (and contesting the notion that the PHY is 100% solid). For the record, the ITU and the HomeGrid Forum have made note of the need to finalize the MAC specification. This could be accomplished with a companion spec for a media access controller that could be implemented in firmware is expected to be complete as early as September 2009. Thanks to Rick Merritt at The EE Times for that good explanation.
2. The MoCA folks feel that they were largely shut out of negotations in the ITU process, arguing that they had put forth a recommendation to make the ITU backward-compatible to MoCA. Contacts at DS2 and CopperGate note that the ITU specification is not backward-compatible with any current "no-new-wires" standard, and trying to achieve this and please everyone would have resulted in a much slower process. They indicate that it will be up to individual semiconductor companies to build in backwards compatibility.

Were their politics involved in this process? Undoubtedly. I do understand the sense of urgency under which both the IEEE and ITU have been working. It would appear that standardizing on a single powerline solution was really the critical component of the standards process, as this standards mess has held up market development for far too many years. Although MoCA supporters may not like feeling shut out of the development process, one explanation I got from someone privy to the ITU process was simple but probably a critical factor. He indicates that - for the European market in particular - coax solutions will not have the same critical role to play as powerline. Therefore, a solution like MoCA - which is well suited to the U.S. cable industry - simply wasn't going to be considered in the final process.

MoCA is now part of DLNA Device Interoperability Standards

The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) announced today that it will be incorporated into the Digital Living Network Alliance's (DLNA) next version of its Networked Device Interoperability Guidelines, scheduled to be released in early 2009. MoCA joins Wi-Fi and Ethernet as the only LAN technology standards approved for inclusion in the DLNA Interoperability Guidelines. With all of the hubub about G.hn and the ITU's approval of the PHY and architecture portions of the ITU-T G.hn specification, I wonder if DLNA will look at this spec anytime soon?