ATSC by the Numbers

Monday July 25, 2011 – Maya Jasmin

Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) tuner sales have plateaued and are expected to remain that way throughout the foreseeable future. The granddaddy of analog TV shut-offs (ASOs) (the U.S.) has passed, and digital TVs distributed throughout ATSC countries have mostly been equipped with ATSC tuners for some time now. Growth will largely be dependent on overall TV market growth for the next few years.

DTC projects that annual shipments of products with ATSC tuners will hover around 50 million units yearly for the next five years, with 52.2 million units shipping in 2010 and 50.6 million shipping in 2016. Only a few consumer product categories include ATSC tuners in significant quantities and the trend for tuner attach rates in all but TVs is in decline. Categories that contribute shipments to the DTC overall market forecast are PC tuners, set-top boxes (STB) and integrated digital TVs (IDTV).

PC TV Tuners are being eclipsed by other options for video content on mobile devices and PCs. The trend toward tablets has had a negative impact on the category since PC tuners are primarily of the USB form factor and most tablets do not include USB drives. DTC expects 1.7 million units to ship in 2012 and a slow gradual decline through 2016.

With the U.S. ASO long passed, shipments of STBs that include ATSC tuners are far off the heights they experienced during the peak of the ASO. Even with the Canadian and Korean ASOs looming, the category is quickly degenerating. Hybrid STBs that combine pay TV with over-the-air (OTA) reception are now driving this category, but major suppliers of these boxes are dropping inclusion of tuners within their STBs. And with most consumers choosing IDTVs in lieu of STBs, DTC expects 7 million units to ship in 2012, dwindling to under a million annual shipments by 2016.

IDTV shipments obviously fuel the ATSC market. DTC expects 43.8 million units to ship in 2012 and 48.3 million units to ship in 2016, making it the only category to experience growth. The growth in this category is primarily based on the U.S. TV market in which all TVs include ATSC tuners. IDTV is estimated to make up 89% of all ATSC shipments in 2012, growing to 95% of the overall market in 2016.

Space: The Final Inspiration

Monday July 28, 2011 – Stewart Wolpin

When the Shuttle Atlantis makes its scheduled landing on July 21, two eras will end. The first and most obvious is America's taxpayer-funded adventure in space.

But the second is the latest science and technical inspirational era.

Throughout our history, both global but especially domestic, we've experienced events – good and bad, such as wars – that inspired a boom rush of intellectual or artistic activity related to that event. For instance, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan inspired a generation or two of kids to pick up guitars and start bands, Woodward and Bernstein inspired a generation of kids to join the student newspaper (I was one of them), and, the focus of this people-oriented tech blog, the American space program got our collective tech juices flowing.

For the consumer electronics business, the ending of America's space program could mean losing our future gadget inventors.

The Apollo effect

My dander gets raised each time some attention-seeking politician, mocking commentator or lame comedian mocks the space program as a drain down which billions of government money has been poured just to land some clowns on the moon or to provide MTV with a logo. Denigrating the space program displays an appalling ignorance of how our modern technology world came to be.

Dozens of engineers who played key roles in developing personal computers, digital cameras, cell phones and many of our other modern gadgets cite the space program as the reason they chose to pursue engineering. Plus, an enormous number of consumer products and technologies were developed or advanced for or around the space program, such as satellite communications and television, along with technologies used in health care, materials, food and other behind-the-scenes technologies, more than 6,300 by one count.

Our tax-funded space investment has paid off 100 fold in new technologies, industries and companies that wouldn't have existed without us landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

Past and future inspiration

With no space program, America now has nothing to spark adolescent interest in tech and science, other than perhaps the existence of the current crop of cool gadgets themselves.

This may feel like an awkward segue, but I'm currently writing the bios for this year's CEA Hall of Fame inductees. I mention this because nearly all this years inductees – and those from years past – were inspired to enter a technical field by, something; for many, World War II, the desire to contribute something to the war effort, was that something.

(Interestingly, three of this year's inductees, SanDisk co-founder Eli Harare, co-Qualcomm founder Andrew Viterbi and home video game inventor Ralph Baer, were all Jews born outside the U.S. in the midst or wake of the Holocaust, their persecuted immigrant refuge background perhaps providing an added emotional need to technologically excel few of us could understand.)

But beyond inspiration from the world at war, most of this year's Hall of Famers found their futures from less grandiose fonts.

• When he wasn't reading, as a boy Baer spent most of his walking hours tinkering with his Erector Set.

• Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet and founded 3Com, swore he'd one day earn a degree in electrical engineering from MIT after becoming addicted to the technology behind his beloved model trains.

• The childhood hero of Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, was Thomas Edison, a living legend throughout Shannon's youth in the tech-active 1920s.

• Long absences from his family members back in his native Italy from which his family escaped in the run-up to the war instilled in the young Viterbi a desire to find ways of communicating across political and geographical borders.

Since the modern state of war is unlikely to inspire any of today's youth to anything accept to avoid the military, and since the even soon-to-be late/lamented shuttle program isn't exactly as sexy as a manned mission to the moon or to Mars, we're going to have to figure out a way to boost interest in science and engineering if we're to have future inventors of future gadgets for us to pontificate on in this space.

In lieu of a big event, perhaps it is time for CEA to put its money where its Declaration of Innovation is and sponsor scholarships for electrical engineering students who need that extra inspiration to become the next Harari, Viterbi, Metcalfe, Shannon or Baer.

RVU Gets Served

Monday July 11, 2011 – Greg Scoblete

Last month, the RVU Alliance announced that it had opened its certification program for client device validation, the culmination of nearly two years of work since the alliance was publically announced in 2009.

RVU - for "Remote User Interface" - is the brainchild of a variety of players in the content, consumer electronics and set-top box worlds, including heavy hitters such as Cisco, DirecTV, Samsung and Verizon. Many of the key chipmakers are involved as well, including Broadcom, Sigma Designs, ST Microelectronics and Trident Semiconductor.

The idea is straightforward: to simplify the distribution of pay TV content throughout the home using a "client/server" model that ensures that consumers get the same interface and quality of service regardless of viewing device. The server in question is a service provider's set-top box while client devices could include smartphones, tablets, Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other, smaller, less expensive set-top boxes. The server can accept any form of pay TV content - from cable, satellite or telco providers - but distributes it to clients throughout the home as IP via DLNA technology. It could also access and share personal digital content stored on DLNA-enabled home storage devices.

Using RVU technology, a TV service provider could deliver a consistent viewing experience and user-interface to all of the above client devices. The technology automatically optimizes the video stream from the server to fit the client device's parameters (resolution, aspect ratio, etc.). So if you, like me, are not allowed to watch Family Guy while the children are awake, you can squirrel away in a private corner of the house with your iPad and get your fix (and if you find a good corner - let me know).

Of particular importance to service providers, RVU enables multi-room viewing of PVR content without the need to place multiple PVRs by each TV. Instead, a client - be it a TV or smaller IP set-top box - can pull recorded shows stored on the server. This cuts the cost to both the service provider and, potentially, the end-user. RVU clients devices can also receive live TV and have access to functions like pause and rewind as well.

Content is secured using Digital Transmission Content Protection-IP (DTCP-IP) so it should, in theory at least, assuage Hollywood's copy protection concerns.

So that's how it works. The question is will it work?

RVU faces something of a familiar chicken and egg problem: CE manufacturers won't build-in RVU clients if pay TV providers won't work with STB makers to build RVU servers. But for RVU to fulfill its promise, you'll need multiple client devices in the home.

RVU's success will likely hinge on support from pay TV providers. DirecTV has been the most aggressive out of the gate: it’s currently field testing an RVU server (the Home Media Center set top box) and plan to deploy it in October. It also announced that several 2011 Samsung TVs will include the RVU client technology. But no other pay TV provider has jumped in. (Verizon is a founding partner of the alliance but has yet to announce an offering.)

Still, RVU's arrival is well-timed. Sensing a competitive threat from so-called "over-the-top" video services delivered to consumers over the open Internet, pay TV providers are increasingly searching for solutions to retain subscribers.

As of now though, the RVU Alliance product page promises - in Hollywood preview parlance - that devices are "coming soon." Stay tuned.

iPod/iPad Déjà vu

Tuesday July 5, 2011 – Stewart Wolpin

Remember the BenQ JoyBee? The RCA Lyra? The Rio Forge 128? They were all casualties of the iPod in its march toward portable music player domination.

And if you're paying attention, this whole lopsided Apple vs. the world scenario is playing itself out again in the nascent tablet PC wars.

This week, HP finally bowed its long-awaited webOS-based TouchPad, the 2,764th (give or take) iPad competitor. HP joins numerous Android tablets along with the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, the e-book-cum-tablet Nook Color and, soon, whatever Microsoft with Windows 8 and Amazon are said to be cooking up, tablet-wise, in trying to core Apple.

How are these iPad alternatives doing? If you have to ask…

First I have to say I find this whole tablet brouhaha more than just absurd. A little more than a year ago, the entire technology industry was gleefully falling over itself predicting the device no one thought anyone would want or buy and that Apple had stupidly named for a sanitary napkin would end the Cupertino company's mobile dominance.

Go ahead – amuse yourself with the stories listed in a Google search of "Apple iPad fail February March 2010 -2011" from, like I said, a short 15 months ago. HIGH-larious.

And yet, here we are a year and nearly 20 million iPads sold later and all those iPad poo-pooers now insist they have a better tablet. I don't know if I should laugh or laugh harder.

Even more shocking, according to comScore, iPads account for 97 percent – NINETY-SEVEN PERCENT – of all tablet Web traffic in the U.S., 89 percent globally. Someone's not using their tablets.

Is there any hope for non-iPad tablet makers? Not in the short term.

COMPETITIVE IMBALANCE

Yes, the iOS ecosystem is a huge hurdle for Apple's tablet competitors to overcome. One way to combat iPad's ecosystem advantage is by offering tablets at lower prices, which few have.

Most of the big name wannabees have illogically priced their tablets higher than iPad, a situation that reminds me of the old Catskill joke: "The food is so bad here," comments one diner. Replies the other, "Yeah, and such small portions!"

A couple of lower profile tablet makers have figured this out; for instance, the upcoming 10.1-inch Toshiba Thrive Android 3.1 tablet due to ship in a couple of weeks is priced at $430 for the 8 GB version, compared to the 8 GB iPad at $499.

But with Thrive's lower price comes a reduction in a key specification – seven hours of video viewing battery life vs. iPad's 10 hours. Toshiba is not alone. Shorter battery life is another problem plaguing iPad's competitors.

NO CLIO WINNERS HERE

Worse, these iPad competitors rushed into the market faster than Usain Bolt. But, like Monty Python's 100-yard sprinters with no sense of direction, they had no idea where they were going. Sure, they worked out the technical stuff, but it's obvious they haven't figured out why people would buy one.

Why obvious? Check out tablet commercials, as I did for this column. What can you do with an Android or BlackBerry tablet? According to Motorola, Samsung and BlackBerry tablet commercials, you can learn to double-dutch jump rope, be encased in some futurist pod and watch four videos at the same time, activities all worth spending $500-$800 on.

The funniest excuse for a tablet purchase rationale is presented in the latest Motorola Doom commercial in which a sales woman reads the mind of the male customer. He wants to buy a Xoom but wonders silently, "How can I convince my wife?" The telepathic sales lady spouse-convincing response?

"Your wife will love the dual core Tegra 2 chipset."

I don't mean to be sexist, but how many wives who don't have an engineering degree would even understand what a "dual core Tegra 2 chipset" is? And even if she understood it, she'd love it? My wife, who works for IBM and therefore groks the idea of a dual core chip, loves Bravo's Housewives of… shows, sushi, Twitter, museums, power walks in the park and, hopefully, me. Chipsets? Not so much.

And we're wondering why iPad continues to dominate the tablet market?

RETAIL CONSEQUENCES

Even without these marketing missteps, iPad should maintain its short term dominance the same way iPod did – because of the sheer number of competitors.

In the cell phone world, consumers are used to multiple operating systems and multiple vendors, so the ever-increasing number of Android phones have enabled the Google OS to compete with iPhone.

But in the tablet world, there's no established usage pattern for consumers to latch on to. It's too new a category.

So, with consumers already puzzled about what they'd do with a tablet, too many OS choices becomes paralyzing. So as we do when confronted with a "War & Peace"-length menu at a diner, we shrug and just make the simplest, truest choice: a burger. iPad is the burger of the tablet world.

Until other tablet makers create a convincing purchase rationale and pricing argument, iPad, like iPod before it, will continue to be the red meat of the tablet industry for a long time to come.