Zenverge Showcases Industry's First Whole-home, Multi-screen DVR Implementation with RemoteGUIDE at Connections 2010

Zenverge, a leading developer of advanced media ICs, announced it will demonstrate the industry's first multi-room, multi-screen DVR implementation with a remote user interface at the Connections 2010 conference. Now shipping to qualified customers worldwide, Zenverge's current generation ICs use advanced, patent-pending algorithms and a highly optimized pipeline to deliver unprecedented media processing capabilities in a highly compact, power-efficient, and cost-effective footprint. The demos at Connections 2010 will showcase the industry's highest performance and highest density transcoding capabilities, as well as Zenverge's RemoteGUIDE capability to transport user interface and metadata to multiple displays. RemoteGUIDE uniquely allows operators to construct and distribute a rich user interface for multiple displays from a single server or gateway device without putting any additional burden on the home network while supporting the installed base of networked displays, thus significantly reducing the overall cost of deploying whole-home DVR.

In addition to demonstrating at the conference, Zenverge's CEO Amir Mobini will also be participating in a panel entitled "Future of the Set top box". For more information about this panel, click here.

Founded in 2005, Zenverge is a fabless semiconductor company devoted to accelerating consumer access to next generation digital content and services. The company is a leading developer of Advanced Media ICs built around the patented ZEN architecture, a core technology for next generation digital media devices. The company is based in Cupertino, California. For more information please click here.

Motorola Strengthens IP Video Portfolio with Strategic Acquisition

Motorola Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of SecureM, LLC and its wholly owned subsidiaries, together operating as SecureMedia®, a developer of software-based digital rights management (DRM) and security systems for IP video distribution and management. The acquisition, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close in Q1 2010. SecureMedia will now become part of Motorola's Home & Networks Mobility business.

SecureMedia develops and markets software systems for securing the distribution of digital entertainment over multiple platforms to multiple devices, including set-top boxes, wireless handsets, PCs and portable entertainment devices. SecureMedia's Encryptonite ONE™ system supplies proven end-to-end security for content in managed IP, mobile, over-the-top (OTT) and hybrid environments, enabling new business from the consumption of high-value content any time and any place. With this acquisition, Motorola will be offering both stand-alone and integrated software security solutions to IP video customers.

Motorola's Home & Networks Mobility business delivers fully integrated and customizable media solutions to their subscribers. As a global video leader in digital entertainment devices, digital and IP video headends and digital video processing, Motorola brings its video expertise to bear as operators seek to evolve their networks for the future.

For the full article, please click here.

OSGi Alliance & HGI Collaborate to Boost Broadband Provider Flexibility & Service Offerings

The OSGi Alliance and the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) announced a partnership agreement that will enable broadband service providers to offer more flexible applications to residential customers. Under this agreement, the partners will work together to integrate the OSGi Service Platform into the home gateway, creating a software execution environment that will facilitate the deployment of new service capabilities into the digital home.

The home gateway (HG) plays a central role in the digital home, interconnecting computers, devices on the home network, and the Internet, all while supporting Quality of Service and remote management. Service providers are increasingly looking to deliver HG-based consumer services such as energy management, media server, and home network diagnostics. Pairing the dynamic and modular OSGi technology with HG-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and protocols will greatly extend the service capabilities of the home gateway.

The OSGi Alliance and the HGI will develop the software execution environment for Home Gateways within the context of established concepts, standards, and technologies in the home gateway and software/middleware markets. To implement the agreement, members of the organizations’ OSGi Residential Expert Group and HGI Software Execution Environment Task Force will align requirements and specifications, timetables and roadmaps, and identify other organizations and technologies which should be involved.

Connected consumer electronics sales to exceed 100 million units annually by 2013

Consumer demand for digital media and online content will push worldwide annual sales of connected CE to more than 100 million units by 2013, according to the new Parks Associates report Home Networks for Consumer Electronics.

The market for connected CE includes networked TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles, home media servers, and set-top boxes. Through network and Internet connections, these devices can access and display home network content such as photos and music and retrieve online content such as widgets, games, and video from Hulu and YouTube.

Diverse user scenarios create multiple challenges for technology developers, according to Scherf, including interface design as well as connectivity.

Home Networks for Consumer Electronics covers consumer and technology trends in the connected CE market and provides forecasts for multiple connected CE product categories. For more information, visit http://www.parksassociates.com/, or contact 972-490-1113, sales@parksassociates.com.

The CONNECTIONS™ conference, June 2-4, features a Connected CE track, including the panels Extending the Reach of Wired Networks and Interfaces and Bringing “Cloud Media” to Consumer Electronics Devices. For registration, or to request a press pass, visit http://www.connectionsconference.com/.

To view the full press release, click here.

Stellar line-up of speakers at CONNECTIONS Summit at CES

Parks Associates is looking forward to CES next week. The CONNECTIONS Summit will be hosted on January 8 and 9 in the back of the South Hall - rooms 106/107. For more information , view the entire agenda online.

Speakers and sessions include:

Thurday, January 8

9:30 AM - 10:45 AM Wireless Networking
David Borison, Senior Director, Marketing, TZero Technologies
Noam Geri, Co-founder, Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, AMIMON
John Marshall, Chairman, WirelessHD LLC
Professor Andrew Nix, Co-Founder & Director, ProVision Communications

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Advanced Video Services: The Next Big Thing?
Charles Cerino, VP, Comcast Center Technology, Comcast; President, MoCA
Ed Forman, EVP, Products and Services, ActiveVideo Networks
Jean-Marc Harion, Vice President, Business Development, North America, Orange – France Telecom NA
John Reister, Chief IPTV Architect, BigBand Networks
Marty Roberts, VP Marketing, thePlatform

12:30 PM - 1:45 PM Digital Home Customer Support: From Troubleshooting to Upselling?
Fred King, VP, Sales & Marketing, PlumChoice, Inc.
Art Lancaster, CTO, Affinegy
Anthony Rodio, Chief Operating Officer, support.com
Singu Srinivas, Vice President, Premium Support, Radialpoint
Bill Stanley, Director, Operations Solutions, Telcordia

2:00 PM - 3:15 PM The Five Ws of Social Media
Scott Brown, Director, Marketing, Cisco
Rick Clancy, SVP of Corporate Communications, Sony Electronics
Rajat Paharia, Founder & CEO, Bunchball
Michael Papish, CEO, MediaUnbound
Ron Richards, Director of Marketing & Product Management, Revision3

3:30 PM - 3:45 PM The Changing CE Purchase Decision
Research Presentation by Tricia Parks, Founder and CEO, Parks Associates

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM Never Lost Plus Much More Fun — Navigating Through the Booming GPS Market
Fazal Ali, Senior Director, Product Management, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies
Luke D’Arcy, VP, Advanced Technology Marketing, CSR
H.P. Jin, President, CEO and Co-Founder, TeleNav
Darren Koenig, Director, Wireless and Internet Markets, Tele Atlas

Friday, January 9

9:30 AM - 10:45 AM Connected Consumer Electronics: Linking Premium Applications and Content across Devices
Richard Bullwinkle, Chief Evangelist, Macrovision
Chenyi Chiu, Strategic Program Manager, HD-PLC Alliance
Robert Eisses, President and CEO, Icron
Kazuhiro Kitagawa, Vice-Chairman, PUCC
Loren Shade, VP Marketing, Allegro Software Development Corporation

11:00 AM - 11:15 AM The Changing CE Purchase Decision
Research Presentation by Tricia Parks, Founder and CEO, Parks Associates

11:15 AM - 12:30 PM The Future of Digital Photo Frames: A Display or Platform?
Stephen Joe, President/CEO, D-Link Systems, Inc.
David Snook, Product Marketing Manager, Digital Frames, Kodak
Mark Vena, Vice President, PC Business Unit, Synaptics, Inc.
Mike Wodopian, VP, GM Media Processor Solutions, RMI Corp.
Richard Yeh, Marketing Director, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

12:45 PM - 2:00 PM Connected Game Consoles: King of the Digital Home
Glenn Broderick, Executive Director, Gaming, AT&T
Ben Huang, Director of Product Management and Marketing, TV Business, Microsoft Corporation
Jeremy Lockhorn, Director of Emerging Media, Avenue A| Razorfish
Susan Panico, Senior Director of PlayStation Network, Sony Computer Entertainment America
Randy Stude, Director, Intel

2:15 PM - 3:30 PM TV 2.0 – The Future of the Set-Top Box
David Foote, CTO, Hitachi USA
Doug Jones, Chief Architect, Cable, BigBand Networks
Aslam Khader, Chief Product Officer, Ensequence
Joe Seidel, Director, Global Business Development, Connected TV Devices Business, Microsoft Corporation
Steve Tranter, VP, Interactive and Broadband, NDS

3:45 PM - 5:00 PM Breakout Year? New Paths for Home Systems
Michelle Leyden Li, GM of Home Control, Zilog
Kevin Meagher, CEO, Intamac Systems
Eric Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Control4
Matt Theall, Technology Strategist, Intel Corporation; President, HomeGrid Forum
Evan Tree, Chief Products Officer, Logitech

Research indicates expansion of entertainment-at-home services despite poor economic conditions

Parks Associates announced that almost 66% of U.S. consumers have altered their spending habits in the 2008 as a result of the country’s deteriorating economic conditions. These changes have the greatest impact on entertainment spending outside of the home, according to Digital Media Evolution, a new consumer survey, but also open new areas for growth in customer support services.

Parks Associates finds that as consumers cut spending on outside sources, this trend creates greater dependence on at-home entertainment services, creating new opportunities for broadband, communications, and entertainment providers in offering customer support, self-diagnostic, and troubleshooting solutions.

In 2008, U.S. consumers are most likely to cut their spending on dining out, travel, and out-of-home entertainment. Additionally, nearly 50% indicate that they will be spending less on consumer electronics because of economic conditions.

Parks Associates advises providers to take back-to-the-basics approaches to revenue growth and cost savings. Service provider costs for supporting home networks alone could total hundreds of millions of dollars annually. By implementing self-diagnostic and troubleshooting solutions and building remote support capabilities, service providers can turn customer support from a liability into an opportunity, reducing OPEX costs initially and growing revenue-generating customer support businesses in the long term.

How to Play in the Sandbox and Keep your Hands Clean

With a plethora of new Internet-base home services being launched by major service providers in the coming year, senior operations executives are favoring a ‘sandbox’ approach to installing customer premise equipment to reduce technical support and field service costs.

Not a wholly new term in the technology industry, a Sandbox is a virtual environment that is used by programmers to develop new code in a manner that doesn’t impact production systems. The same concept is being used by service providers and home networking consultants to rid themselves of the aches and pains of future service calls by providing a secure, private playground within a customer’s network made specifically to manage the Internet-based home devices.

Inundated with various wireless frequencies, today’s home is a virtual jungle-gym of communication conflicts and challenges. Many service providers and home networking consultants are continually challenged with what they may have originally thought would have been a simple installation of a new piece of technology such as an IP network camera or home automation device. This is largely due to the variety of custom network settings required by each device.

Central to the Sandbox is a home gateway which could be as inexpensive and simple as a WIFI router. Preconfigured and set to register (and re-register) with your host servers, the gateway manages communication between the devices and the service provider. The modest cost of a gateway will drastically reduce the costs of repeat service visits related to ISP-downtime, customer-driven network upgrades and, worst of all, Gen Y power-users configuring the network to work with the latest beta of their favorite online application.

It isn’t surprising to find that most successful service providers have used this approach in large-scale deployments of home services such as VoIP(i.e. Vonage), Internet TV(i.e. Apple TV) and video surveillance (i.e. iControl Networks). The advantage of being able to securely control the network environment, the Sandbox, in which your devices operate is crucial to controlling ongoing service costs.

In spite of new standards such as UPnP and hardware manufacturers trying to build the ideal All-in-One Home Gateway that is a modem, router, PVR and controls home automation devices, the Sandbox will continue to the service provider’s main approach to delivering Internet-based applications. For the consumer it may mean yet more boxes in the electrical closet. It is a small price to pay for a consistent, reliable experience which is the ultimate goal of every profitable service provider.

CONNECTIONS™ Europe Sessions - Day 1

CONNECTIONS™ Europe: Strategies for Digital Living Markets
4-6 December

Tuesday 4 December
0900-1500
Parks Associates Workshop
Four Pillars of Global Digital Lifestyles Growth

Communications and Value-added Services
· Broadband Update: Changing Dynamics in a Maturing Market
· Home Networking: A Focus on Communications and Entertainment

IPTV and Interactive TV
· Television 2.0: IPTV, Mobile TV, and Interactive Television

Digital Media and Entertainment
· Consumers and Digital Media: A Global Perspective
· Broadband Video: A Fourth Alternative for Entertainment?
· Online, Console, and Mobile Gaming Trends

Home Networks and Controls
· Home and Health Management: 2007 and Beyond

SPEAKERS / MODERATORS
coming soon
CONNECTIONS™ Europe Agenda

Triple-play Support: The View from the Home Network

Summary information from Day 2: CONNECTIONS™ May 2007, hosted in Santa Clara, CA

This panel addresses the role of residential gateways, advanced CPE, and service provisioning and networking maintenance tools in reducing support costs for the service provider and enhancing the bottom line.

Duncan Bees, Deputy Chairman of the HGI Quality of Service Working Group, PMC-Sierra, Inc. Wayne Davis, Technical Advisory Board, Peak8 Solutions
Richard Nesin, Vice President, Marketing, CopperGate Communications
Tushar Saxena, Director, Home Networking Technologies, Verizon Communications
Michael Stich, Director, Service Provider Strategic Marketing, Texas Instruments
Ofer Vilenski, CEO, Jungo Software Technologies
Moderator: Kurt Scherf, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Parks Associates


Panelists discussed the required features of an end-to-end broadband and in-home network ecosystem as managed by a service provider. Kurt Scherf introduced the topic by indicating Parks Associates’ research predicts service providers will manage upwards of 30% of the home networks, via smart residential gateways, deployed by year-end 2010. Scherf further indicated that if the industry is to provide sufficient support for advanced services, it must build solutions to address the following issues:

• CPE installation and configuration;
• Service provisioning;
• Diagnostics and monitoring;
• Remote support;
• Telephone support; and
• On-site support.

The panelists represented a diverse spectrum of companies involved in the end-to-end management of broadband and home network services. Wayne Davis, representing Peak8 Solutions, indicated that they are focused on solutions for both the customer as well as the help-desk agent. Rich Nesin at CopperGate discussed QoS monitoring that is made possible through home networking chipsets. Michael Stich at Texas Instruments discussed the company’s DSP-based monitoring and measurement solutions, notably PIQUA™. Ofer Vilenski from Jungo discussed the role of residential gateway software in monitoring, management, and easing service provisioning. Duncan Bees from PMC-Sierra discussed the Home Gateway Initiative (HGi) and its goal of helping service providers deploy more standardized management and provisioning solutions. Tushar Saxena from Verizon said that the service provider’s biggest challenges today are installing broadband and home networking services and platforms with minimal expense; ensuring interoperability between different customer premise equipment; and making troubleshooting more efficient.

Clearly, service providers face growing challenges as they take on the responsibility for deploying a growing number of converged services. Ofer Vilenski mentioned that customer support costs in the first year of a subscriber’s service to a triple-play service can often exceed the dollars spent on the home networking equipment. The panelists believe that there is no firm business model for monetizing support at present, fearing that a fee-based business model may alienate customers today. Instead, enhanced customer support could actually be a good differentiator for service providers to set themselves apart from their competitors.

Opening Comments

Summary information from Day 2: CONNECTIONS™ May 2007, hosted in Santa Clara, CA.

Opening Comments
Presented by: Kurt Scherf, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Parks Associates

Summary of this session:
Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst for Parks Associates, began Day 2 with an overview of Parks Associates’ latest research across a number of digital lifestyles product and service categories. Scherf reminded the audience of a key point made at the CONNECTIONS™ 2006 conference – that industry consolidation in broadband and access spaces was indicative of the importance of facilities-based service providers in deploying many of tomorrow’s consumer technology offerings. Further, this consolidation is evidence that service providers and their equipment vendors are working to establish seamless end-to-end links between their services and their customers in order to provide a rich array of bundled services offerings and to further strengthen the bond between carrier and customer.

He provided examples of the major consolidation in the past year, just in the broadband and access areas. As examples, he noted Motorola’s acquisition of Broadbus, Cisco’s purchase of WebEx and Ashley Laurent, Ericsson buying Tandberg and Redback, the Alcatel-Lucent merger, and NDS acquiring Jungo.

With this major consolidation in place, a key focus for the next year will be the deployment of actual consumer products and services across the digital lifestyles value chain, including such categories as Data & Voice, Multimedia/Entertainment, Home & Lifestyle Management, and Value-added Services.

Already carriers in the broadband and television services areas are expanding their portfolios of offerings. Competition between and among providers is a key driver for companies desiring to strengthen their services. Residential broadband penetration will exceed 50% of U.S. households this year, and broadband and television service providers will focus on three key tenets as they market their services – Cost, Convenience, and Convergence.

A new area for growth will certainly be in the “Web 2.0” or social networking/media spaces, Scherf said. Parks Associates conducted a significant study in 2006 – Digital Media Habits – that explored consumers and their habits as they relate to self-created and social media. There are definite areas of interest and potential, particularly in how younger consumers are expressing themselves through Web sites and via content sharing. However, there are many questions about how (or if at all) social and community networking will be a significant revenue-generating business.

Home networking has reached new heights, Scherf said, and there is a renewed focus on multimedia and entertainment networks, particularly now that Apple has entered the fray with its own media receiver. Also significant is the involvement of the service provider community in pushing not only data and voice networking platforms but also entertainment (multiroom DVR) solutions. 2007 and 2008 will be significant years for the reintroduction of media adapter devices and for a renewed focus on consumer storage that places as much emphasis on content sharing as it does on safe and secure backup and safekeeping of digital media. In total, Parks Associates expects more than 900 million devices to be deployed in home networks by the end of 2011.

Home and lifestyle management trends indicate some interesting growth opportunities. Remote management solutions – including Web cameras and two-way access – will continue to see growth in the next few years, and the service provider community will be key to deploying more of these to consumers. This sector will also benefit from the current popularity of advanced entertainment solutions because both high-end home theater and multiroom audio could provide a good framework for higher growth of home controls. Health management is also an interesting area of growth. Parks Associates is projecting a $2.1 billion market for enhanced remote and home healthcare applications under four main areas – Acute Care Monitoring, Wellness Monitoring, Geriatric Monitoring, and E-health Services.

Finally, Parks Associates is continuing to watch the development of digital home support and service offerings. This sector, with the promise of reducing the complexity of consumer technologies such as home networking, broadband, and digital devices, abounds with opportunities. Parks Associates has outlined nine major areas where different players could enter and succeed in enhanced customer support – everything from enhanced security and automated fixes to professional technical support and the role of “digital home advisor” services.