How We See CE

Despite the promises of existing wireless HDTV standards, no standard has yet to successfully enable the wireless HDTV ecosystem. This situation raises a number of questions, including:

• What is the true value proposition for wireless solutions in the CE space, and
• When will wireless HDTV become of real value to consumers?

The answer is that wireless solutions have enormous potential in the CE space, but in order to be successful, such solutions must reliably enable whole home connectivity and support uncompressed HD video content.

As we have all seen, video content (often HD) is coming to consumers through an increasing number of channels, including cable and satellite, broadcast, physical media, Internet, and mobile networks and devices. However, consumers today cannot easily display this content throughout their homes, and at times even in-room connectivity is a challenge. For example, content acquired on a PC or mobile device rarely makes it to the entertainment room TV, and content originally purchased for the entertainment room often stays there.

There are two major causes of this. The first is the obvious physical barrier: sources and displays are in different rooms, and moving content through walls is a non-trivial task. The second cause is format barriers: sources and sinks are often incompatible, with the causes of incompatibility ranging from physical connectors to video codecs to media players to content protection. These problems are not impossible to overcome, but solutions are often difficult, unreliable and expensive, especially for the average consumer.

Multi-room wireless technology effectively removes the physical barrier, and is essential for any successful wireless standard. To overcome the format barrier, the standard must deliver an uncompressed stream, with copy protection based on a ubiquitous and flexible solution. Compressed solutions do not provide consumers with answers for some of their common use cases. For example, what if the display doesn’t have a specific media player (e.g., flash) or video decoder (e.g., MPEG 2/4)? What about legacy CE devices with no compressed output? What about content that is not compressed to begin with (e.g., PC content or PlayStation 3 games)? Based on my experience creating and running HDMI, I strongly believe that HDMI’s success is due in large part to the fact that it is uncompressed. Recall that when HDMI first came out there were compressed solutions available with a CE market lead. 

Several wireless solutions, based both on 60 GHz and UWB, have been proposed for delivery of video. UWB cannot support the high rates of uncompressed 1080p, however, and its range in the home is limited. 60 GHz perhaps has greater potential than UWB for wireless video, but, like UWB, it is very limited in range and is essentially confined to line-of-sight cable replacement, providing a solution to a very limited set of problems.

The upcoming WHDI standard can solve both physical and format barrier issues by delivering wireless, uncompressed, whole home Wireless HDTV on the unlicensed 5GHz band. WHDI’s video modem technology enables reliable delivery of full 1080p beyond 100 feet through walls with less than one millisecond latency. WHDI also incorporates copy protection based on HDCP 2.0, making it capable of fully supporting HDCP 1.x devices and multi-vendor configurations. Additionally, with relatively low power consumption, WHDI can provide laptops and mobile devices with an easy connection to the entertainment room TV.

This is not to say that there is no place for compressed wireless solutions such as 802.11. I believe that 802.11 and WHDI are complementary solutions; 802.11 enables the whole-home delivery of compressed content and traditional “data” applications, while WHDI enables the whole-home delivery of uncompressed content (together with A/V control data). In fact, as I will discuss in future blog entries, there is a significant similarity in the physical implementations of 802.11n and WHDI that will enable a convergence path for integrated board-level and even chip-level solutions in the near future. These would bring to market a powerful wireless solution based on the WHDI standard that have the advantage of the cost efficiencies of the 802.11 ecosystem.

Leslie Chard
WHDI            

Leslie Chard is President of WHDI LLC and Secretary for the WHDI (“Wireless Home Digital Interface”) Consortium, whose members include Amimon, Hitachi, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sharp and Sony. Mr. Chard previously helped found the HDMI standard and was President of HDMI Licensing, LLC.