Major exhibitions can be useful barometers of current trends in an industry and that was certainly true at the recent TV Connect show in London.
Some of the themes were predictable, such as the continuing debate over standards and timeline for 4K deployments and concerns over security for live sports streaming. More surprising was the considerable interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) in the context of the smart home, which would be expected at a general broadband or Telco show but not so much at an event dedicated to TV. This shows pay TV operators are at last waking up to the opportunities the smart home offers and also the threat it could pose by allowing alternative providers in through the backdoor. When the pay TV operator also provides the home broadband connection, services such as environmental control and security monitoring are natural extensions via the home network.
Given this trend, there was great interest at the show in our SoftAtHome’s ScreenAtHome product, which runs on either the Android or Linux operating systems to offer a migration path towards the smart home. On the one hand this enables traditional broadcast TV features such as Live TV, EPG and VoD, which can be complemented with apps from the fast growing Android Lollipop ecosystem. Then through Linux, operators can start adding non-TV services such as digital home control, enabling traditional set-top box based services to be extended with IoT functions. This can put pay TV operators in pole position for the emerging smart home, building on their established base in entertainment to capture this potentially huge market around convenience, comfort and control.
Another noteworthy and not entirely unrelated trend was the interest in secure Network Attached Storage (NAS) in the home, driven by concerns over privacy of personal information and content. There is a natural tension between the demands for data privacy and backup. Privacy is best met by keeping data at home under the owner’s control, while for back up, data should be replicated in the cloud. If your house burns down, data stored at home on NAS would be lost if were not replicated externally, but for highly confidential or personal information, users might not be willing to trust the cloud, especially in the light of several recent high profile security breaches.
SoftAtHome can square this circle through our secure NAS combined with the cloud. The idea is that users can chose which data to replicate in the cloud and which to keep at home exclusively on the NAS. The latter might be highly personal or intimate information and this would still enjoy all the resiliency of our NAS package, while in many cases the bulk of the user’s data would be replicated in the cloud.
The political pressure to implement counter-terrorism measures on the Internet as well as continued lobbying from content rights owners are both contributing to a global sense of unease for the subscriber about cloud based service privacy and rights. Users should only need to choose what data is important to them; their service provider’s should handle the security and legality. Operators with a trusted brand can use it to promote a data backup service exclusively onto their own servers creating a new friendlier tier in the subscriber’s perception of the cloud.
Our solution called MediaCloud is the first plug and play package designed specifically for operators, allowing subscribers automatically to secure their media content from all connected devices transparently and consume it on any screen.
We are pitching MediaCloud and ScreenatHome as complementary components of the emerging connected home, which will combine entertainment with smart services around a secure network and storage platform acting in synergy with the cloud.
