Cable and Satellite Mediacast said goodbye to Earls Court with a near flourish

The last Cable and Satellite Mediacast to be held at Earls Court (May 15-17) will probably be remembered for the humidity as much as anything that was on display. Next year the show moves to the new Excel complex which, builders permitting, will be sited in the heart of London’s Docklands.

The Monday crowds added to the temperature, but went towards suggesting that the show might be about to return to former glories, having somewhat lost its way in recent years.

High speed Internet access and the coming battle between cable and ADSL featured large and the show has capitalised on the industry’s newly found interest love of matters interactive.

Possible bad news on the cable modem front for the DVB DAVIC consortium. EuroDOCSIS seems finally to have arrived. Broadcom announced a single chip solution for EuroDOCSIS modems, which the company described as “a critical step in enabling cost-effective EuroDOCSIS cable modems”. Thirteen cable equipment vendors have successfully participated in initial interoperability tests at Ghent University. Meanwhile, EuroDOCSIS seems to be moving towards ETSI approval.

So is DVB DAVIC dead in the water? Not necessarily. Even those most dismissive of the business case for the standard are wary of making that prediction, because politics plays such a large part in the establishment of any standard. France Telecom still stands behind DAVIC, as do other large telcos (some of whom do not, however, seem to be doing very much on the cable modem rollout front).

“We have huge opportunity costs,” says Broadcom European sales director Frank de Kruiff of any investment in DAVIC modems. “The specification is OK, and the interoperability is sort of OK. But there’s no market.” De Kruiff points out that while in the US, there are some 50-60 companies working within the DOCSIS standard, there are only two working with DVB-DAVIC.” According to de Kruiff, “no European set-top vendor is putting a Euromodem in a set-top”. Broadcom estimates that all told, there will be four to five million cable modems sold in Europe by 2002.

Broadlogic meanwhile announced a slate of deals: the broadband networking equipment vendor is supplying LuxSat (on the Astranet satellite platform) with its Satellite Express PCI satellite receiver cards to, for integration into LuxSat’s multimedia terminals. LuxSat is offering interactive and on-demand television, as well as access to a communication network that offers connection to customised multimedia services. The service is expected to be commercialised this year. A second deal saw Broadlogic team up with The Fantastic Corporation to work together to market and promote the companies’ combined technologies. Broadlogic also signed a deal with Mindport’s conditional access supplier Irdeto to combine and support Irdeto Access’ IP encryption technology with Broadlogic’s Satellite Express PCI+ receiver cards.

On the ADSL front, Pixstream is pushing its compact low cost ADSL video headend equipment into Europe. The company already supplies its equipment to Kingston Communications and is involved in practically all ADSL video trials. Chris Colman, director of sales and business development, says Pixstream is also targeting cable operators that want to take advantage of unbundling of the local loop to offer services outside their own franchise areas. The compact size of the Pixstream headend allows ease of co-location, likely to be a significant issue as wannabe video providers scramble to find space in the telcos’ crowded local exchanges.

Not everyone had chosen to join in the party and the show is a long way from the dish-fest it once was. Set-top box manufactures large and small were present, though Pace and Nokia were both conspicuous by their absence. Staff from both manufacturers were spotted around the show suggesting that their non-appearance might be a one off.

Dish manufacturers Raven and Channel Master seemed distinctly out of place within the brave new world of Interactivity. At the back of the hall distributors Bentley Walker gave us a reminder of times gone by with the stand piled high with digital receivers and accessories. Global Communications, the Essex-based firm that produced the Astra 1D frequency shifters, has somehow bridged the gap between old and new. Its latest device is the Skylink Remote Eye, which using the second RF output of the Sky Digibox, enables viewers to change channels in one room with the set-top box in another. At the Electrical Retailing Show Global produced a number of the units in assorted dayglow colours, ostensibly as a joke, but dealers pointed out they could easily sell them into teenage bedrooms. The result is that dayglow Remote Eyes in yellow, pink and green are among the most popular items on the Global website.

The new boys on the block are those making interactive applications for television, such as Agency.Com and Static, as well as the broadband satellite applications demonstrated by Europe Online.

Agency.Com’s most recent launch is that of a chat service on the Tele Danmark cable network. Developed for the OpenTV platform, though easily capable of being ported to other APIs, the chatroom brings a further concept from the Internet and places it on the TV. Significantly the service actually links back into the Web and is not just restricted to fellow subscribers on the Tele Danmark system. It was the Danish cable operator that was the first to introduce an e-mail service, though initially this was a one-way system, before a return path was introduced.

A demonstration of the chatroom used a standard remote control for writing the messages. Letters are called up in a similar way to the method in which SMS messages are sent using a mobile phone. An alternative system used an on-screen keyboard, although a lap top keyboard, similar to those used by Open… or ONdigital in the UK could also be used.

The future for Mediacast is promising, particularly if it manages to successfully incorporate the former ECC cable show, as it plans to next year. Let’s hope Excel has invested in some air conditioning.