CABLE CONGRESS 2013 – LONDON. The possibility of European cable operators signing up to the US Reference Development Kit (RDK) for set-top boxes has been raised by a CTO panel at London’s Cable Congress.
In a set-top box, manufacturers sit their technology on top of the System on a Chip. Next comes the RDK, with operators looking for a much commonality as possible.
“Converging on a common standard is a good place to be as we have some time to research as the whole thing that is coming out of Comcast with RDK as a standardisation is a good environment,” said Michael Lajoie, CTO, Time Warner.
“We’ve had close to 80 people asking for copies of the licence and we’ve executed on 30 of those,” added Comcast CTO Tony Werner. “It’s not open source, but a shared source and the community, but if you can vote with your code and Balan may well contribute a European module.”
Liberty CTO Balan Nair did not speak directly on the development of RDK on the UPC networks nor did he venture his view on TiVo, as deployed by Liberty acquisition Virgin Media.
Liberty’s involvement however is not new, having previously been raised at The Cable Show in Boston last May.