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USA Today Discovers It’s a Good Time to Buy a TV

USA Today, the US’ national newspaper, has discovered what we’ve been calling the Golden Age for buying a TV set. In an article called “TV bargains abound this holiday shopping season,” reporter Mike Snider says the hunt for a low-priced HDTV should be as easy as shooting fish in a barrelthis shopping season.

He credits several factors for creating a confluence of market pressures that make this a great time to buy a TV set:

- Economic woes made consumers hesitate so far this year about buying big-ticket items.

- Inventories are high.

- The era of TV sets as we’ve known them has ended. The 2012 models that are coming are mostly smart TVs, and consumers will soon no longer want to buy “dumb” sets that don’t connect to the Net for entertainment, information and social networking.

To Martin’s list we add a) TV set makers until recently have not reduced the quantity of sets that they are making to meet the reduced demand, b) 3D sets have not been the boom market — the must-have product that set makers and studios expected, c) store-front retailers have found they have to cut prices sharply and offer free shipping to the home to compete with the online giant Amazon and d) consumers want to upgrade their flat panel set to a larger size. (Ever hear anyone complain that the size of the TV screen was too big?)

We expect the pricing pressures to cause one or more of the well-known TV makers to opt out of making TV sets in the next 12 to 18 months.

Bargains abound, the article points out:
- Best Buy, under intense pressure from Walmart and Amazon, has a 42-inch Sharp 1080p LCD set at $199.99, a Dynex 24-inch LCD TV for $79.99 and a 55-inch LG 1080p LCD display with LED-backlighting for $897.99.
- Target has a 40-inch Emerson LCD HDTV for $265 and a 46-inch Westinghouse LCD TV for $298
- Walmart has 32-inch and 40-inch Emerson LCD HDTVs for $188 and $248, respectively, plus a 43-inch Samsung plasma HDTV for $398.

As to quality, the article quotes Al Griffin, technical editor for Sound & Vision magazine, as saying, “Plasma still retains an edge over LCD” when it comes to brightness of even the darkest images and uniformity of the picture. However, the best LED-backlit LCD displays “can give plasma a run for its money” — usually the expensive ones with a full-array backlight. Plus LED LCD sets use much less power than plasma sets.

The average selling price for a flat panel TV has fallen from $935 in 2007 to $545 now, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Now is the time to buy a TV! If it’s not a smart TV, then get a smart TV adapter like Apple TV if you want to play the tunes and playlists that are on your PC, a Logitech Revue to add Google TV technology to the set, an LG Upgrader that offers all the popular apps or any one of several others.

Broadcom Brings DOCSIS-Based EoC to China

- Lands 2 Major Trials
- Partners with Gear Makers ZTE and Sumavision

Surely you didn’t think the DOCSIS crowd, led by DOCSIS chip making king Broadcom, was going to ignore the Ethernet over coax (EoC) market that is about to boom in the BRICs, especially China.
Ernie Bahm, who is in charge of Broadcom’s DOCSIS-based EoC solutions, said the company expects to fare well in markets like China that have a different network-to-the-residence architecture than the States or most of Europe. What makes it different is that:

a) Most people live in buildings that are multiple dwelling units (MDUs) with anywhere from 20 to 200 or more residences. Fiber from the pay TV service runs deeper into the network (hence the term “deep fiber”), all the way to the side of or in the basement of the building. It terminates there in the equivalent of a head end.

b) Residences within the building are connected to the external fiber in several ways: copper wiring, Ethernet, fiber but mostly coax.

c) Traditional DOCSIS is too expensive because it’s designed to support long runs of coax, upwards of miles, to up to 20,000 residences. It’s overkill in China and Asia where a “last 100 meters” solution is needed, not a “last mile” solution.

d) By and large the pay TV services’ networks are in stage one, which is one-way analog and only for video. Prodded by the Chinese government, they want to upgrade their networks to two-way digital, which will bring affordable broadband to millions of consumers.

The DOCSIS-based Ethernet over coax (EoC) technology that Broadcom has developed substantially reduces the cost of the head end gear that’s in the MDU where fiber and coax meet. It’s lowered to the point that DOCSIS-based EoC can compete pricewise with other EoC technologies whose roots are in home networking: HomePNA, HomePlug and MoCA chipmaker Entropic’s MoCA EoC, which is called cLINK.

EoC Technologies
Name Chip Maker
HomePNA EoC Sigma Designs
HomePlug EoC Qualcomm Atheros
MoCA-based cLINK Entropic
DOCSIS-based EoC Broadcom

DOCSIS-based EoC has speeds up to 800 Mbps, which can be divided up among the residences in the MDU.

Bahm says DOCSIS-based EoC is better because it’s using an industry standard that is so popular with cable TV services that it’s deployed worldwide. The cablecos’ non-profit CableLabs oversaw the development of DOCSIS to make sure it had the highest quality of service (QoS). DOCSIS-based EoC is fully compatible with the traditional DOCSIS, making it possible for the pay TV services to offer interoperable services.
CableLabs and CableLabs Europe are the organizations that certify all DOCSIS and EuroDOCSIS gear to ensure 100% interoperability and consequently very high QoS. HomePlug and HomePNA do not have a certification authority with the industry respect that CableLabs has — such as the IEEE might be.

The fiber that runs to the MDU can also be used to connect individual homes that are nearby.

The Chinese Market
The cable TV industry is much more fragmented in China than the US and Canada. There are upwards of 2,000 cable TV companies but what they all have in common is the Chinese government’s involvement — as a means to “enlighten” the population.

The State Council of China wants to accelerate the country into universally available broadband. To that end it has designated 12 cities for the cablecos to deploy trial installations of triple play — voice, pay TV and broadband — in the 2012-2013 time frame. It’s expected that after that, it will push deployment even further, possibly by consolidating cablecos into one for each of the country’s 31 provinces. It may even consolidate them into one cableco for the entire nation, which could ultimately have as many as 300 million subscribers. By comparison, North America and Europe combined have less than 200 million residences with broadband.

The Chinese Next Generation Broadcast (NGB) initiative is prompting the pay TV services to increase significantly their capital expenditures. DigiTimes Research says the expenditures could exceed $100 billion over the next three years.

Jiang Wenbo, president of academy of broadcasting planning at China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), said, “Next-generation broadcasting and TV network is a major technical measure for the radio and TV industry to promote network convergence. First, it will be deployed in cable TV networks in a bid to promote the interconnection of cable TV networks in China, build a nationwide two-way business and technology platform, provide technical support for operators to deliver cross-field businesses, offer users richer radio and TV programs as well as diversified services, and push forward cable network integration in the country. Among them, access technology is key for NGB. Technology based on CableLabs’ DOCSIS specifications and PON+EoC are both technical options for NGB and meet the cable TV network technology system that will achieve wide applications in current two-way cable TV reconstruction.”

The government wants the cablecos to be a competitor to the telcos such as China Telecom and China Unicom that currently dominate the broadband market.

The designation of the 12 cities got Broadcom’s attention. There’s also the fact that in 2008 China had almost 45 million wireline pay TV subscribers, all of whom could within three years become broadband subscribers. That’s a lot of cable modems, which means that’s a lot of DOCSIS-based EoC chips.

The goal with DOCSIS-based EoC is to provide operators with a technology that provides strong QoS with vendor interoperability for providing broadband in each residence. A fiber EPON network to a coax media converter (CMC) in the MDU could support up to 200 broadband subscribers, not only the 40 or so residences that limit other EoC technologies. More CMCs could be added as needed.
DOCSIS-based EoC is a very controlled network in that there is no need for collision detection that other EoC technologies need to keep neighboring apartments from interfering with each other. Because it is DOCSIS, it does not have the speed and throughput restraints that home networking technologies have.

The version of the head end gear for DOCSIS-based EoC that performs CMTS (cable modem termination system) functions, is much less expensive than traditional DOCSIS because it is designed to connect to fewer residences. It is installed in the MDU, not in the cableco’s remote location. Yet, all the DOCSIS back office functions can still be performed. Low cost cable modems for the residences coupled with lower cost CMTS functions make DOCSIS-based EoC price competitive with HPNA and Home Plug — and, according to Broadcom, functionally superior.

Broadcom’s DOCSIS-based EoC for fiber (EPON) has the standards based benefits to the cablecos: multivendor interoperability, standardized and proven QoS for voice, lowest cost and wide availability of cable modem and set-top-boxes. Broadcom provides a development kit that offers schematics, software and hardware components.

Two of the 12 cableco trials, Topway in Shenzhen and Gehua Cable in Beijing, are using DOCSIS-based EoC gear that has Broadcom’s chips. Gehua Cable covers all 16 of Beijing’s districts and transmits more than 100 channels to more than 4 million subscribers.

Broadcom has been working with network gear makers ZTE and Sumavision, which are building the infrastructure that is expected to be completed in about 12 months. Dr Jigang Ru, VP of Sumavision Technologies Group, which got the equipment order at Gehua, said, “We believe that Broadcom’s DOCSIS-based EoC solution will become mainstream for cable operators. This standardized solution will drive the pace of building in China’s NGB and accelerate the process of China’s triple play. Based on Broadcom’s progress, we will accelerate the product commercialization, and make the final product scale deployment in Gehua and the other cable operators in China.”

India has similar needs, Bahm said, but is a much more fragmented market with 20,000 or more pay TV services. Brazil and Russia also look promising, he said, but it’s China where the action is now because of the government’s insistent pushing.

Bahm said Broadcom is confident that DOCSIS-based EoC is the leading EoC technology because of its speed — an aggregate of 800 Mbps, low-cost and, well, because it’s DOCSIS, the same DOCSIS that the cablecos outside of China have selected.

Dan Marotta, executive VP and general manager of Broadcom’s broadband communications group, said, “These trials demonstrate the strong momentum for our standardized and high quality DOCSIS-based EoC cable infrastructure technology as the preferred solution to drive China’s NGB efforts and accelerate the deployment of three network convergence.”

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