Bandwidth begins at home

Cart, horse – who knows which comes first any more. That’s how bandwidth demand works in the digital home. Is the big driver of HDTV bandwidth, for example, the purchase of HDTV TV sets? The availability of multiple networks broadcasting in HDTV? Is it some specific type of HDTV programming, like sports? Or a particular event, like the Superbowl? The answer is, of course, all of the above (mixed in with a little bit of “who the heck knows”).

But there are some things that we do know for sure. One of these is the fact that more and more media moves from traditional physical formats (like CDs and DVDs) and broadcast formats (like over-the-air TV and radio or even traditional cable TV broadcasts) and into purely digital formats.  Movies go from DVD and 10p.m. broadcasts to WMA and MPEG-4 streams and stored files. Music goes from CD and FM to MP3s and Internet streams of Sirius and XM.

TV shows end up, legally or not, on the “DarkNet” – being traded via BitTorrents within hours of broadcast. Heck, you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe the stories of studios purposely letting torrents of hot shows (like Battlestar Galactica) and movies (like Star Wars Episode 3) hit the ‘Net ahead of release, just to help brew up some excitement and hype. All of Hollywood acknowledged the buzz for Star Wars helped send it to a $158 million first weekend. And don’t forget that Google, a company which hasn’t missed a trend in quite some time, has been investing heavily in its own Internet-based video service.

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Cart, horse – who knows which comes first any more. That’s how bandwidth demand works in the digital home. Is the big driver of HDTV bandwidth, for example, the purchase of HDTV TV sets? The availability of multiple networks broadcasting in HDTV? Is it some specific type of HDTV programming, like sports? Or a particular event, like the Superbowl? The answer is, of course, all of the above (mixed in with a little bit of “who the heck knows”).

But there are some things that we do know for sure. One of these is the fact that more and more media moves from traditional physical formats (like CDs and DVDs) and broadcast formats (like over-the-air TV and radio or even traditional cable TV broadcasts) and into purely digital formats.  Movies go from DVD and 10p.m. broadcasts to WMA and MPEG-4 streams and stored files. Music goes from CD and FM to MP3s and Internet streams of Sirius and XM.

TV shows end up, legally or not, on the “DarkNet” – being traded via BitTorrents within hours of broadcast. Heck, you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe the stories of studios purposely letting torrents of hot shows (like Battlestar Galactica) and movies (like Star Wars Episode 3) hit the ‘Net ahead of release, just to help brew up some excitement and hype. All of Hollywood acknowledged the buzz for Star Wars helped send it to a $158 million first weekend. And don’t forget that Google, a company which hasn’t missed a trend in quite some time, has been investing heavily in its own Internet-based video service.

Another known fact: One of the biggest roadblocks to more ubiquitous digital media is the problem of storing and distributing that media in the home. We’ve all got well established mechanisms for getting our old-fashioned broadcast and physical media into our homes – cable TV coaxial cables, for example, or NetFlix envelopes for that matter. For digital media, however, the infrastructure to store, process, distribute and browse this kind of media throughout the home is still a work in progress.

There are a lot of potential pieces and parts of this infrastructure – wireless or wireline distribution media, user interface, QoS mechanisms, DRM, and more. Another of these building blocks is the storage system used to cache or store digital content as it flows into the home. Storage – whether you call it DVR or PVR, NAS or SAN, set top or home server – is an increasingly important part of the equation.

That’s why we took note of Agere’s recent announcement of the company’s new NASn01 family of chipsets.  These chips are fully buzzword compliant – Wi-Fi and Gig Ethernet, USB 2.0, Serial ATA (SATA ) drive controllers, Universal PnP, Linux, RAID, and QoS support – you name it, they support it.

What’s really interesting to us is the ability of these chips to support HDTV programming to eight different TVs without any performance degradation.  With 1G bit/sec of non-blocking bandwidth, these chips provide the kind of throughput in the home storage/server environment that can support any mix of in-home applications on today’s roadmap.