 | Issue: | EMEA 2012 |
| Article no.: | 16 | |
| Topic: | The case for Android Pay-TV STB: Tales from the Android TV tranches | |
| Author: | Moshe Bartov | |
| Title: | CEO | |
| Organisation: | PeerTV | |
| PDF size: | 302KB |
About author
Moshe Bartov is CEO of PeerTV, an Over-The-Top (OTT)Set-Top-Box (STB) and end-to-end solution provider which recently released PeerDroid, an Android based STB solution for the Pay-TV market. Mr Bartov brings more than 20 years’ experience in management, marketing and R&D in the broadcast and telecom sector. Before joining PeerTV, he served as a Senior Product Marketing Manager at NDS, a world-leading vendor of Pay-TV where he managed the NDS middleware product line which powers set-top-box Tier-1 operators worldwide.
Prior to NDS, Mr Bartov served in senior positions at CellGlide, VP Marketing at CT-Motion, Flash Networks and as Business Development Manager at Sun Microsystems where he led the introduction of Java technology in Mobile Phones (J2ME) in and the initial deployment in Europe.
Article abstract
Android promises to be the next Linux ofPay-TV world, with its wide developer community and its openplatform. Android has extensive APIs, built-in security, web browser and numerous readily integrated applications. However, there are many challenges too: it was not designed for broadcast media, lacks TV user interface, cannot provide content protection and its ARM chip base is not compatible with MIPS, which is commonplace in the TV-world. Despite all that, Android based Pay-TV has great potential for innovative service providers.
Full Article
What is Android?
Android, a Linux based operating system for mobile devices represents a major achievement for an open source, widely embraced and supported software stack which today power more than 400 million devices and have captured 59 per cent of the global smartphone market. Through its Google Play application market, it has introduced more than 500,000 applications as of October 2011 and more than 20 billion applicationswere downloaded by June 2012. Android Inc., which started the development of the Android platformin 2003,was later bought by Google in 2006,aiming toharness its marketing and promote itsoperating system globally.
Android was designed primarily for smartphones, but its open nature and architecture contributed to its adoption by other consumer electronics, including tablets, laptops, ebook readers and smart TVs.
Android in the Set-Top–Box (STB)- the promise
The notion of Android powered set-top-boxes has been discussed in the industry since 2009 and many vendors as well as customers have expressed interest in the adoption of the technology. Android as a foundation for the software to power Pay-TVset-top-box devices present several key advantages:
• Optimised for constraint resources – Android software design grass roots are smartphones which are similar in capabilities (and constraints) to set-top-boxes.
• Extensive APIs for Application developers – Modern STB requires extensive user interface and data representation as well as providing access to third party developers.
• Built in security for application – A ‘sandbox’ model isolating applications as well as a permission mechanism allow Android to be an extendable environment running market applications while maintaining system integrity and minimising risk.
• 500,000 applications, millions of developers,an unprecedented platform support compared to any traditional Pay-TV middleware, which spells greater access to developers, applications, technology and development tools and significantly reduced development costs.
• Superb web browser –Webkit based browser for those server side middleware and other applications all bundled within the system.
• Convergence-ready – In the world of multi-screen video delivery, customers wish to receive similar services and experience across their STB, Smartphone and tablets. Android, a dominant Smartphone operating system and to some extent a tablet operating system, can help Pay-TV operators offer similar services across multiple devices effortlessly.
In the early 2000’s, many STB software vendors have moved from Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to Linux, as it reduced their costs and extended the availability of open source device-drivers, APIs and interfaces as well as applications. Android provide a much better jump board for developing set-top-box middlewaresoftware than what Linux can provide today.
Challenges
Is Android the perfect solution? Developers wishing to power set-top-boxes using Android still face some technological challenges. It is not optimized for TV – The platform was originally developed for a 3”-4”Smartphone with a touch screen and low resolution – as opposed to a Full HD, remote control operated set-top-box interface. This means that many user interfaces elements designed for a 1′ distance needs now to be modified to fit a 10”span. Touch, pinch and drag operations need to be substituted with gesture more suitable to a remote control.
The vast majority of Pay-TV services are today based on broadcasting technology (cable, satellite and terrestrial) and require the drivers and necessary software to support receiving this broadcast, handling the video streams as well as the meta-data such as the electronic program guide that is embedded within. Allthis is missing from Android and need to be augmented withprovided proprietary APIs.
There is insufficient chip support. Over the past 15 years the mobile industry has embraced almost exclusively the ARM based chip technology while the TV industry has followed the MIPS based chip roadmap – the two camps speaks different language and are incompatible. Although Android has been demonstrated working on MIPS based, it does not mean that it will support all Android applications. Hence, it is best to use ARM based TV chipset. Only caveat? There are limited choices vendors, such as Marvel, Entropic (Trident), AMLogic and Rockchip. The larger CHIP vendors in the TV industry have also hinted at plans to introduce ARM based chips.
Android, as many modern operating systems, introduces a media playback framework. Because the original design was mobile, the basic media framework support is limited and the multimedia formats are different from those that you are accustomed to find in a set-top-box.
Support for Conditional Access (CA) does not exist in Android and support for Content Protection i.e. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is limited to Widevine, starting only at Android 4.0. In the OTT (Over-The-Top) market there is obviously a demand for much wider selection of content protection means and some require deep hardware integration to really meet security conformance.
Fragmentation – Android has four major releases so far and what is applicable to the TV market is Android 2.3.x and Android 4.0. Android 2.3.x has by far the largest install base and as such enjoys better application support while Android 4.0, recently released, is still building up support.
Should I implement Android STB today?
I believe Android spells a big opportunity forPay-TV operators, certainly OTT operators looking to lure customers by offering high endset-top-box with rich functionality and exciting user experience. Android also spells reduce development cost, faster time to market of new boxes, new features and large supportive community.
There is great momentum in the industry to adopt Android as an underline platform for both vertical Pay-TV system as well as consumer oriented TV platforms such as Android based Connected TV. Android today is soon to become the next evolution ‘wonder’, just as Linux was ten years ago. Vendors and operators which starting to invest today, will have a superior product and service and will provide more value and better experience to their viewers and subscribers.
