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.
With the prices of SATA drives dropping like crazy, it’s easy to envision all sorts of devices being built around such a chip. Set top boxes have been including storage for some time, but these chips could support a whole-home set top that goes far beyond that of today. Router and gateway vendors could easily add storage to their products (and already are). And more traditional storage players can create servers and NAS for home media.
What’s the impact on service providers? First, keep in mind that storage is only part of the overall puzzle. Distribution and user interface, for example, are other areas that still need some advances (we talked about the UI issue, and a solution, in our last column). But although its not the only factor, storage – particularly media-centric storage designed for worst case performance requirements (like multiple HDTV streams) – is a vital part of the overall equation.
Making media easily accessible is the bottom line here. Entertainment media can be a huge driver of bandwidth requirements. Imagine what happens to bandwidth requirements when Google or Yahoo! or some completely distributed BitTorrent style system starts sending HDTV or high-res multichannel audio to every customer on the network.
Media-centric storage enables this kind of application. Storage makes digital content available to more users, and importantly, to less technically savvy users. The good news is that storage simultaneously creates the demand for bandwidth and content while moderating the impact of that demand. Since the content is buffered, users don’t need a fire hose of bandwidth at any given time, but a steady trickle at all times.
As storage (and other elements) fall into place, turning that trickle into revenue is the next step.
