Charlie Gonsalves
Texas Instruments

The market for Internet Protocol delivery of digital television (IPTV) by telecommunications service providers is emerging, and makers of set-top boxes (STBs) need to keep their options open. What promises to become an enormous market in a few years is today a welter of competing solutions. Each of the handful of hardware and software elements that make up the IPTV environment is supplied by a number of companies. Hence an IP-STB, as the focal point of delivery, needs to be able to adapt to the particular IPTV "ecosystem" in which it is deployed. As a result, when it comes to choosing the technology on which to base its product line, flexibility and interoperability become major concerns for STB original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). TI's digital signal processor (DSP) technology continues to be an enabler as the overall IPTV ecosystem evolves and as the many possible combinations of operating systems, compression technologies, middleware, browser, conditional access/digital rights management (DRM), live encoder vendors and Video on Demand (VoD) server vendors today begin to solidify into a few well-established systems in the future.