Brian's Brain

Continued from 'Live From NAB: Scrumptious Nuggets From Random Briefings'....

Monday morning: Microsoft's TV Group
A confession: until I met with Jim Brady (Senior PR Manager) and Ed Graczyk (Director, Marketing and Communications), the light bulb hadn't yet gone on in my head as to the fundamental reason why Verizon's FiOS fiber optic deployment was to-the-home, versus AT&T's to-the-curb-and-copper-from-there U-verse approach. FiOS, as Brady and Graczyk explained it, was a 'fat pipe' technique much like cable TV, simultaneously broadcasting all channels down to each customer for subsequent channel selection at the set-top box.

Conversely, as I already knew about U-verse (and incorrectly had also assumed was the case with FiOS), in what Brady and Graczyk referred to as 'true' IPTV, per-customer, per-TV channel selection occurs at the server. The U-verse 'pipe' into each home can conversely be much lower-bandwidth, but at the tradeoff of much higher implementation complexity at the server, especially considering consumers' intolerance of lengthy channel-switching delays. AT&T's implementation target is 20-30 Mbps of copper DSL bandwidth into each home, which is sufficient to handle one high-def stream (~8 Mbps), two simultaneous standard-def streams, and normal Internet access traffic (including VoIP). Does this design goal cause you to view network neutrality in an altered light?

Brady and Graczyk showed me a prototype of Microsoft's IPTV running both on a Motorola set-top box and on the Xbox 360. On the console, the service will be offered in conjunction with unnamed partners [editor comment: AT&T in the US is probably a safe bet!], and it's targeted to be available in time for the holiday 2007 shopping season. You'll be able to buy an Xbox 360 with the IPTV software pre-installed from the service provider; customers who already own consoles can purchase a software upgrade for them. The HDMI-equipped Xbox Elite is not required; Base and Premium consoles with un-DRM'd analog video outputs are equally acceptable to the content providers, but in any case you'll need to buy a HDD (and the recently introduced 120 GByte drive is highly recommended).

Monday pseudo-dinner (brews and appetizers at Converge@Pieros): Waav
The company makes 3G cellular data routers, like the Kyocera and Linksys products I've previously reviewed, albeit with one key enhancement; Waav's second-generation product can bond together, load-share and fail-over between two 3G channels for even higher effective WAN throughput. I asked booth representative Jonathan Venerian why I was getting such cruddy Sprint data service performance this week, and he said that in order to prioritize all-important voice traffic, under heavy network load conditions both Sprint and Verizon (from whom, interestingly, I got steady EV-DO Rev. 0 service the entire five days I've been here) automatically down-throttled EV-DO to 1xRTT at the base station.

I also got 1xRTT service with Sprint yesterday, this time with the cellular data card directly plugged into my laptop, but this morning on the Monorail car (which I hadn't previously realized offered Wi-Fi throughout its entire traverse, not just at the stations) I got EV-DO Rev. 0 speeds.

Granted, Las Vegas may be feeding the cars with WAN access via a non-Sprint, non-cellular method, but I didn't notice a satellite dish (or satellite latencies), and I doubt the broadband data's being passed through the rails, either!

Tuesday morning: Microsoft's Consumer Media Technology Group
I mentioned my Sunday dinner conversation regarding WMA standardization to Gary Greenbaum, Director of Business and Technology Strategy (and formerly Head of Codec Technologies at RealNetworks), and got an unexpected response from him. Greenbaum pointed out that Microsoft had recently realigned itself in several distinct divisions, each fundamentally responsible for its own P&L (Greenbaum is in the Entertainment & Devices Division, led by Robbie Bach, and reports to Amir Majidimehr). Greenbaum pointed out that the SMPTE standardization process for VC-1 was long and brutal and that the team responsible for accomplishing that goal wasn't necessarily enthusiastic about repeating the process! But, although he cautioned that his words shouldn't be viewed as a commitment from Microsoft, he was personally in favour of standardizing WMA now that the standard and Professional (high-resolution, multi-channel) bitstream formats were frozen, to 'complete the multimedia package' that VC-1 began. Stay tuned, he says....

Today's lunch: Mathstar
I asked Dan Sweeney, COO and a 22-year Intel veteran, if he was excited about Intel's increasing willingness to license its CPUs' bus specifications to other companies for use in developing acceleration chips, since Mathstar's FPOAs (Field Programmable Object Arrays) would, like FPGAs, be interesting silicon platforms for such chips. Sweeney's response, pointing to Intel's own 80-core massive-parallel-processing project, suggesting that Mathstar's chips might be viewed as competitive and therefore that Sweeney might get a cool reception from his former colleagues, validated my mid-February ISSCC supposition.