A couple of major pay TV operators in Vodafone Spain and Videotron in Canada this week came out with their own 4K set tops or DVRs, both claiming they are first in their respective markets.
Vodafone already has considerable experience of 4K, having brought out its first set top at its German operation, the one built around its acquired Kabel Deutschland, using the first SoC to market, the Broadcom 7252 delivered by Cisco using a Scientific Atlanta design and NDS MediaHighway middleware. Last year in June Vodafone added a 4K device in Portugal, but this is very different, as there it uses Mediaroom.
Vodafone seems to be saying that in Spain it will have a 4K option for every contact technology, whether that is hybrid fiber coax, VDSL, ADSL or through GPON fiber, each with access to a search engine and recommendation engine, and a cloud based DVR offering 7 day catch up and access to Netflix (free for 6 months). We presume that Cisco is the incumbent for this design too, but have no confirmation of that.
Vodafone also said it will add 4 new channels in Spain including a Festival music channel, one with extreme sports and movies and a ‘SlowChannel’ for accompaniment or contemplation, with visually stunning images. Vodafone also said it would enrich its’ on-demand, video store, which already has 3,000 titles, presumably with some more 4K content.
Over in Canada, it is Alticast pushing out news that Quebec based Videotron has launched its first 4K UHD DVR, and it is in fact on a physical device made by Samsung. The cable TV service opted for Samsung built devices first back in 2010 using the cable Tru2way MHP standard, again using the Cisco Powerkey conditional access system it inherited from Scientific Atlanta. It turns out that this is now GEM, which stands for Globally Executable MHP, a move which healed a rift between the MHP used in Europe (mostly in Italy) and the CableLabs Tru2way standard.
As far as we know this is the first 4K system using that Alticast stack, and a spokesman emailed us that, “Alticast’s GEM software stack continues to evolve and meet our needs in a rapid deployment environment.”
Videotron actually launched this service back in August, but Alticast has only now got permission to reveal its involvement. Today Videotron is one of the top three pay TV providers in Canada with 1.74 million homes, and around 257,000 OTT video customers.
The new devices allows for 8 recordings at once, will record 320 hours of HD content or 115 hours of UHD content in 2 TB of storage, and claims to be a 12x speed improvement over its previous device. It uses a Broadcom chip, likely from the same family at the Vodafone device, probably the 21,000 DMIP 7445 which can support 4 transcoded UHD streams. The device is being sold to customers as the illico 4K Ultra HD PVR and it supports the Videotron multi-room PVR system which links to other smaller IP set tops around the home supporting other TVs.