Set-Top-Box (STB) software stacks have come a long way since its inception back in the early 1990s, with custom & bespoke software vendors providing proprietary components for most of the STB software-stack. Still today, most of the higher level STB components are still indeed proprietary - for example, the likes of Middleware providers (
NDS,
OpenTV,
Irdeto, DirecTV, EchoStar, etc.) are still pretty much closed, but the game-changer was really the advent of the
Linux Kernel, and especially its foray into the embedded space, when it really started to take off and start gaining critical mass from early 2003 in Set-Top-Box stacks (if I recall correctly). And more recently, and this is something that I'd forewarned my previous company (NDS) about, was the advent of the Android stack,
way back in 2007 when I first downloaded the Beta Android Core SDK and saw immediately the similarities of this stack vis-a-vis set-top-box middleware software stacks, and lo and behold, Android STBs were seen in early 2009/2010; and are already becoming the mainstream choice for quick-and-easy, low-cost-to-market projects.
I am not sure how many STBs (apart from legacy) are still using the likes of
uCos,
vxWorks,
Nucleus,
ST OS/20, etc.(I had at a previous life worked on all these OSes), but nowadays, the OS of choice is definitely a variant of the
Linux Kernel, available for free! A Linux system opens up the world to so much more: in terms of utilities, components & application engines, almost any type of functionality that exists on the PC/Systems world, is just a port away from the embedded device world.
PayTV Operators and Middleware System vendors alike, would spend months to years, re-inventing the wheel for functionality & features that are readily available in the PC world. Before Linux, these vendors would literally re-create software components from scratch: Compression engines, Point-to-Point Protocol, TCP/IP stack, HTML engines, UPnP stack, etc, etc. Time-to-market is much shorter than before, proof-of-concepts can be also be done in record time. In past projects I've seen teams use free, off-the-shelf components, to name a few:
libupnp,
pppd,
httpd,
dhcp,
libcurl,
xbmc,
ffmpeg,
webkit,
directFB &
gstreamer to do some impressive demos. I myself, have personally used other open source software like the
Festival Speech Engine to bring real-time Text-To-Speech to set-top-boxes.
I attended a session recently where
Broadcom's (BCM) STB team presented their chipset roadmap & demonstrated their Trellis Software Framework, built on open source. It's really interesting to see that BCM is quite well established in the Open Source community, using as well as reciprocating. Their proposals on using an open interface really defies the old ways of traditional Middleware stacks is really an interesting (most likely disruptive) thread worth keeping an eye on...
, providing an overview into what the business of PayTV actually entails. We learnt from past experiences of people who've worked in several countries in launching PayTV operations in-country, had an overview of a core component of the system (i.e. Content Management System), touched on Next-Generation platforms, and culminated in a demo on a low-cost (sub $100), but advanced Set-Top-Box, exploring the opportunities that await the African market.
