November 23, 2011

Motorola Touts Home Control, HTML5 Guide Experience

Motorola Mobility had a strong presence at last week's Cable-Tec Expo with both its Chairman and CEO Sanjay Jha and its President Dan Moloney speaking on panels at the opening session. In addition, the company had a slew of product news at the show.

Jha stressed the home network, perhaps in a self-serving maneuver to promote Motorola's 4Home Software Platform for cable. (For more see Note To Cablecos: Own The Home Network).

Its 4Home Software Platform works with services across the digital home to help people use their connected devices. Open-standards and device-agnostic design enable it to support the full range of disparate devices commonly found in connected homes.

Nate Williams, senior director of product marketing/Converged Experiences, Motorola Mobility, said "Traditionally, telcos have focused on lifestyle (for home monitoring and control), and cable has focused on security. But cable wants to play both sides."

According to Williams, perhaps the biggest news for Motorola Mobility this year has been its DreamGallery solution, a cloud-based HTML5 video tool suite for rapid creation of custom, operator-branded guide experiences with a Web-like interface.

Motorola announced it worked in conjunction with Canada's Shaw Communications to create a new guide experience using DreamGallery software. Shaw will begin launching DreamGallery on the Motorola DCX3200 HD set-top that supports both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 service delivery. This launch will mark the first DreamGallery experience in North America. DreamGallery also can be deployed on third-party set-tops.

Other Motorola product announcements include:

>>The APEX3000 Universal Edge QAM (U-EQAM) offers 8x the density supporting 384 QAM channels per RU or a total of 1536 QAM channels per 4 RU chassis versus its lower density APEX1500 solution. Two APEX3000s can replace two entire racks in the hub of previous generation EQAM solutions.

>>The TXPlus software upgrade for Motorola’s TX32 decoupled downstream module offers operators the ability to double the downstream capacity of their existing BSR 64000 CMTS: DOCSIS 3.0 cards (64 channels), achieving 384 DS channels per chassis, and it increases EuroDOCSIS 2.0 downstream cards by 50 percent (48 channels), reaching 288 DS channels per chassis – all without having to replace CMTS cards.

>>The MOTr modular Hub provides operators with a flexible hub that can eliminate the need for physical brick and morter Hub facilities. The MOTr helps operators move fiber deeper into their systems while reducing physical hub locations. It provides a versatile hub replacement solution, in a simplified full spectrum, or legacy broadcast/narrowcast implementations.

>>Motorola’s next-generation 85MHz digital return system provides 85MHz capable digital return, allowing operators to protect their investment in digital return with a DOCSIS 3.0 compliant, 256QAM capable solution.

>>The Motorola Televation Hosted Client App streamlines set-up costs and time-to-market, making it an ideal solution for small-to-mid-size operators looking to satisfy consumer hunger for TV Beyond the TV. The solution includes UI, log capture, and code download servers. Its flexibility enables small-to-mid-size operators to support their Televation units in the same way they support their existing base of set-tops. Use of a QAM tuner and CableCard for decoding and decrypting means no infrastructure upgrades or use of premium DOCSIS bandwidth.

>>The DCX3600 Advanced Video Gateway provides an entertainment hub for the evolution of TV and video content-sharing in the home. The DCX3600 gives operators the ability to blend broadcast and IP-delivered content and offer multi-screen video experiences today – with minimal impact to the existing service delivery infrastructure or in-home wiring.

Finally, Motorola Mobility announced an expanded product line of Carrier Ethernet solutions, consisting of a number of hub-based aggregation switches/routers, customer premises based demarcation products, an Ethernet Service Management platform, and a 10 Gbps Carrier Ethernet switch designed for deployment in the Fiber Node. Motorola is bringing portions of this product line to the MSO market through an agreement with Telco Systems, a BATM company.

-Linda Hardesty