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Set Top Box Driving Storage Demands

Posted on November, Tuesday 29, 2011 By itVAR News Network

Driving today’s entertainment quarter, Digital Television is being deployed worldwide in both High Definition (HDTV) and Standard Definition (SDTV) formats.

A key element of this deployment is the digital set top box receiver within the home segment. With the help of an increased storage capability, this was when the set top box started its inwards journey into the millions and millions of home globally. 

It may be recalled that First Generation set top boxes had only support for MPEG's video, audio, and transport decoder. Increasingly however, set top boxes are being used as a gateway to the world wide web or the internet and as a hub for home networking. Everything is possible by virtue of packing more storage strata into the device itself. Hence a lot of storage demand is actually being propelled by the set top box segment.    

The Indian scenario
 
As we all know it, government of India has already showed its commitment towards rolling out CAS or conditional access system in the country. As part of this initiative – Conditional access has already been put in place within select areas of the metro cities of India. This move has propelled the demand for STBs not only in the big cities but also the smaller locations of the Indian region. 

Globally as well as in India, IBM Research has helped in creating the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards that are having an enormous impact on multimedia technology for PC applications, digital TV broadcasting, and new consumer products such as the Digital Versatile Disk (DVD). IBM's history of participation and contributions to the standards goes back to the early days of the MPEG committee. Starting in 1993, IBM formed a Digital Video Products Group (DVPG) to develop semiconductor solutions for the emerging MPEG market. 

Using this chip, developed by DVPG , and very little additional logic, one can design a complete set top box solution for the digital TV market. More importantly, the set top box industry is moving towards a convergence friendly era. This means that today’s STBs need better storage capabilities to handle better software platforms and applications that will run on the set top box chip. 

Moving forward, experts believe that the set top box will become a central piece of home computing equipment beyond the normal role of passive entertainment and will also migrate into home networking and e-commerce arenas as well. 

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