Fredio Streams ‘Free TV’ to Your Smart TV

From The Online Reporter   

-Content From PBS, ABC, Lifetime Bravo and Others,
-Will Be Offered on LG Smart TVs
-Not Another YouTube  

Fredio, the smart TV app that aggregates TV video available online and serves it to the living room with an easy IR-remote friendly interface, makes it easy for consumers to find browser-based Web content without a keyboard or a browser.  

Fredio’s tag line is “Free TV for your smart TV,” and the company Web site says it “helps smart TVs to finally deliver on their promise by streaming tens of thousands of hours of premium videos from broadcast TV websites.”  

“Fredio is a specialized video search engine for connected TVs,” Bill Loesch, founder and CEO, told The Online Reporter. “It’s actually not unlike things available on a PC already, such as Sidereel, Flickr, TV.com – that crawl the Web for professional content that’s available on broadcaster sites.”  

The app isn’t out of the gate yet, but Loesch said he’d be announcing smart TV partners in a number of weeks, with LG up first. The app will also be available on Blu-ray players.  

Fredio aggregates content from a number of broadcasters and networks, such as PBS, ABC, Lifetime, TLC, Bravo and USA. When users select a “channel,” the app takes them directly to the Web site’s video. Loesch said Fredio has indexed around 6,000 hours of content from 15 different network sites.  

Fredio has indexed 6,000 hours of content so far.

“We’re trying to index professionally produced content, we’re not trying to be another YouTube, the world doesn’t need that,” he said. “We’re constantly indexing these sites; we expect the list to keep expanding.”  

The content is a mix of full episodes that have previously aired on TV, clips of shows and Web-only content, both scripted and non-scripted. “We’re not making any differentiation between Web-only content and broadcast,” Loesch said, but he added that the app will increasingly include content that’s Web only, as more and more online video being made is premium. 

TV Screen Is Just a Viewing Device

We asked Loesch when and why consumers would want to watch a broadcaster’s online content on their TVs when they could just as easily watch the linear channel. He answered that the TV screen is really just a viewing platform.  

Loesch said the online content is very popular. “There’s a huge amount of traffic going to these sites, from PCs and tablets,” he said. Loesch estimated there were 125 million unique visitors to the top 60 broadcasters’ Web sites every month. “There’s a lot of traffic going to these sites to watch the video.”  

While most, if not all, of that traffic is on tablets and PCs, Loesch said consumers will want to access that content on the bigger viewing device as well. “If they’re going there to watch it on the PCs, why wouldn’t they watch it on their connected TV,” he said. “Internet connected TVs are effectively like iPads and PCs now. They have a browser. Technically, there’s really no difference,” except in screen size.  

Fredio is merely connecting the user to...

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Bridging the Fiber-Coax Gap in MDUs

From The Online Reporter   

- One Ethernet Network from Central Office to Residence
- Great Appeal Where There Are Lots of MDUs, Like China  

Qualcomm Atheros (QCA) is one of a number of companies that are working under the oversight of the IEEE to develop a technology called 802.3bn, also called EPoC for EPON-over-Coax. It melds fiber and EoC into one logical network by, in effect, making coax emulate fiber. In that way, one network scheme will be used from the cableco’s central office to the residence, not two as is currently required. An IEEE task force has been set up to develop the technology standard.  

EPoC will provide speeds of at least 1 Gbps, but most importantly operate as one and the same network over both fiber and coax, the wireline architecture that is becoming the norm in China. QCA’s Alex Liu, who has been a participant in the task force, expects the standard to be completed before the end of 2014, which in real terms may mean 2015 and deployments in 2016.  
EPoC will do very well, he said, outside the States but, he predicted, will not replace the installed base of DOCSIS in the US because EPoC will be used where there are many MDUs such as in Asia. 

The IEEE approved 802.3bn’s PAR last August so its development is underway. Broadcom’s Mark Laubach is acting chair of the 802.3bn task force. The technology has attracted wide attention. 

Representatives from these companies attended the December 18, 2012 meeting:
Arris (equipment)
Aurora Networks (equipment)
Brighthouse Networks (cableco)
Broadcom (chipmaker)
Comcast (cableco)
Cox (cableco)
Excentis (testing and consulting)
Intel (chipmaker)
Qualcomm (chipmaker)
Rogers Cable (cableco)
ST Micro (chipmaker)
Titan Photonics (equipment)  

Please note the number of cablecos (4), chip and box makers (7) and especially the absence of telcos.  
Other 802.3bn task force participants are supporters are:
Alcatel-Lucent
Aurora Networks
Cogeco Cable
CableLabs
Dell
Fiberhome Telecommunication
Won Technologies
Harmonic
HP
High Speed Design
Huawei
Neophotonics
PMC-Sierra
Sumitomo Electric Industries
Technical Working Committee of China Radio &  TV Association (SARFT)
Wuhan Yangtze Optical Technologies
ZTE  


According to the task force, the development of 802.3bn is based on these factors: 

 - The success of DOCSIS in providing for the growing demand for faster broadband speeds and the need to look beyond that so cablecos can “future-proof” their existing coaxial infrastructure to provide even greater speeds.  

 - The continued demand for cablecos’ broadband capacity and increasing consumer consumption of broadband-based IP services for residential and, increasingly, business services.  

 - Worldwide interest and support from cablecos, system vendors, chipmakers and component manufacturers  
It said the goal of the project is to optimize the cost balance between the network infrastructure components and attached stations in the cable network. It wants the.... 



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Qualcomm Atheros Charging Ahead Like a Bull in China

From The Online Reporter   


- 2/3rds of Provincial Cablecos Using Its EoC Technology
- China Developing a New C-HomePlug AV Standard

The Chinese government has set a goal to provide 30 Mbps to every residence.

Qualcomm Atheros (QCA) has continued to maintain its leading market share in providing technology for Building Area Networks (BAN) over rivals Broadcom and Entropic, according to Alex Liu, the company’s staff manager of product marketing. He said that of the 30 or so Chinese provincial cablecos that are currently deploying, about two-thirds have opted for QCA’s IEEE 1901 compliant HomePlug AV-based EoC version.
QCA’s EoC chips are in the gear that various Chinese equipment makers produce for the cable TV industry.
We last talked to Liu about the matter in December 2011, as reported in the article “Qualcomm Atheros Lands 10 Major Chinese Cablecos.”

The technology the three chipmakers are selling is called EoC for Ethernet-over-Coax, but each has a different implementation. QCA’s EoC technology is based on HomePlug, but calling it HomePlug incorrectly sounds as if the electrical power lines are involved, and they are not. It’s strictly coax from a fiber termination point in the basement of or just outside an MDU to a gateway or set-top box in the residence.

Liu also said QCA is working with others on a new industry next-generation standard called 802.3bn that will treat a combination fiber-coax network as a single network.

Taking a global view of coax as compared to twisted-pair copper telephone wires, Liu said that telcos’ copper wires connect between 1.2 and 1.3 billion residences to networks. Coax has only about half as many:
Coax is a more efficient conductor of data, Liu said. It has 1 Ghz of capacity of usable spectrum, whereas copper telephone wires have only 30 megahertz, a 30 times difference. The total global capacity of coax, even with only half as many homes as copper, is 15 times greater. In an ideal world, every residence would have a fiber connection, but that is unlikely to happen, he said, because of the large installed base of copper and coax plus the cost of building all-fiber networks. However, he said, whenever a new network is built, it should be built with fiber.

The end result, Liu said, is that coax is “a rich spectral resource” that is still “under-utilized.”

However, in the US over half the homes with broadband have coax-based DOCSIS. He said where there is a need for broadband speeds in excess of 10 Mbps, then coax or fiber are needed. (That’s because telcos have not yet begun deploying VDSL2 Vectoring with potential speeds of up to 100 Mbps.) Even so, coax still has lots of upside, he said, because DOCSIS currently uses less than 200 Mhz of coax’s 1 Ghz capacity.

According to Liu, EoC in general is a technology that is better suited to the network topology that exists in China — fiber to the multiple dwelling unit (MDU) and coax that runs from the fiber’s termination point in or immediately outside the MDU to each residence.

Liu said that QCA’s BAN technology is a low-cost and highly effective alternative to the DOCSIS technology that US and European cablecos use for broadband, he said.  

China Developing New C-Home Plug AV Standard

China is developing a new open standard called C-Home Plug AV (CHPAV) that is expected to be completed in a few months. QCA’s HomePlug AV-based EoC will, of course, comply. However, because it’s open, other companies could and no doubt will develop products that meet CHPAV requirements. Of course, QCA believes it’s in a strong position in the CHPAV market.

Liu said that as planned, the fragmented Chinese cablecos are slowly consolidating and that their deployment of two-way networks is proceeding apace.
Liu expects that in 2013 competitors such as Broadcom will launch a major counter offensive, but that QCA will be able to fight off the effort because the rival CDOCSIS-based EoC overshoots the majority of the market need. Even if Broadcom strips out “bells and whistles,” he said, it will still be priced higher than QCA’s offering. It’ll have the same kinds of problems that Intel has making low-cost, low-power chips to compete against ARM. C-DOCSIS has as much or more capability than the EoC version of HomePlug, he said, but it is also priced accordingly.  

Looking Beyond China

QCA is already looking beyond China and has trials for STBs with.....


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