Unlocking the Video Treasure Chest

By Jim Barthold

Cable operators have buried treasure – aka recorded media – in DVR-enabled set-top boxes in their consumers' homes, and they should give consumers the keys to retrieve it and do with it what they'd like, including carrying it out of the house.

Motorola calls this a "cache and carry" model and sees it as a "baby step" in the long road to true fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), said Nick Chakalos, who carries the unwieldy title of senior director-product line management, seamless mobility solutions and applications, Motorola Connected Home Solutions Business.

"There is content available to consumers today via recordings or personal content that you have in your home area network. You want to enable them to take that video along with them as part of a managed service from a cable operator," said Chakalos.

This simple idea is, of course, tangled in more complications than a home entertainment system. First, there must be a way to get that content off the DVR and onto the portable device. For a talented few, that means connecting a USB connection from the portable unit to the USB port on a set-top box. For the less talented and far greater audience, Chakalos said, "you shouldn't have to create a new user behavior. People are used to plugging in a portable media device to charge, and we want to utilize the same kind of approach."

The ideal portable device would plug into a charging cradle that would also connect to the data storage device that "automatically does the synchronization that I've asked it to do so the content would be moved to the portable media player for playback later on," he said.

Set-top not alone

That content, of course, doesn't necessarily have to be stored on the set-top – although that's the most logical place. It can also be on the operator's .net offering. The idea – moving it from storage to portable device – would be the same.

The connection is the easy part. Things get hairier from there. Digital rights management (DRM) issues must be covered "by utilizing a content protection scheme and a rights management scheme that is consistent with what's currently being done on cable set-tops under the operator's control," said Chakalos.

Then there's content that looks great on a 50-inch plasma but generally loses some luster on a 2-inch screen. "You want to create a portable media player that can take MPEG-2 content and just play it back," he said. "As the technology evolves and all operators evolve to MPEG-4 … then the full number of other devices that are capable of playing back MPEG-4 become viable alternatives."

Finally, there's certain to be unfriendly pushback from the people who generally provide consumers with these advanced media players – especially cell carriers who won't be eager to provide devices that play cable-generated content.

"We'll have solutions that will enable a consumer to get access to content in any number of different ways," Chakalos promised. "We're talking about the broadest video solutions that will be out there from just a plain old portable media perspective, taking the content that you have in one location and enjoying it somewhere else through a transfer. We're going to enable that for an operator's benefit so they don't necessarily need to have a relationship with a wireless provider to get access to it."

Setting the stage

Getting consumers to adjust to always-there content is just a stage setter for when streaming video and FMC finally happen – although the industry's mixed signals on how that whole FMC thing is going would cause an 18-vehicle pileup on any information superhighway.

"This is the first step in that direction … making sure we can take baby steps that are of value to consumers," Chakalos said. "In the end, everyone is trying to get to the same place from a mobile vision perspective. This is certainly one of the steps along the path to get us there, and it is consistent with FMC for sure."

- Jim Barthold

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