Pace multiroom HCS capable of showing 9 simultaneous channels

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Pace multiroom HCS capable of showing 9 simultaneous channels

UK set top box maker Pace spent last week showing off its first multiroom DVR at a US cable show called the CTAM Summit. Most people in the UK show a quizzical expression when you say the world DVR, because mostly they think of the device as a Sky invention (which it’s most definitely not) simply because the Sky+ box was the first DVR launched in the UK. Even the Freeview digital terrestrial boxes which offer DVR functions are called Freeview+ to borrow from this perception.

But essentially a holy grail for these past three years has been the creation of a box which can store TV programs on a hard disk and ship them around your home for ANY TV in the house to view them – hence the term multiroom DVR (digital video recorder). (Pic shows existing Sky HD DVR).

Pace calls its new device the Home Content Sharing system and it connects a centralized disk storage to multiple HD set-top boxes within the home. This system comes integrated with Rovi’s Interactive Program Guide (IPG) and Connected Platform software. Rovi provides systems to navigate content on cable and satellite TV sets and the company claims 4,200 issued or pending patents worldwide. For those who follow this industry Rovi is the name that Macrovision (supplied music copy protection software) and Gemstar (EPG patents) now trade under having merged.

That’s all very well, but Pace may also need to protect itself by buying DVR patents from TiVo as well (which DID invent the DVR). TiVo recently sued one of the largest US satellite TV companies for trying to invent its own DVR without paying royalties for the TiVo patents, and after four years in court won a settlement involving 100s of millions of dollars and is now suing AT&T and Verizon, who offer IPTV services in the US, also without paying royalties.

Pace claims its multiroom DVR is the first in the market but it’s not. The first were made for AT&T’s U-verse operation, and took at least four years to get right working with Microsoft software and brand new, recently delivered chips. But Pace’s approach is clearly very different. It works by using a home NAS (Network Attached Storage) device centrally, rather than a central DVR which is inside a set top. We presume this means that the tuners are in the set tops, and a tuned MPEG stream of digital video goes to the NAS box and is just stored (possibly encrypted). That way if the stream IS encrypted it can only be returned and played on a set top that has the decryption keys. That would mean that Sky could only play on a Sky box but other terrestrial TV could be played on any TV set.

The Pace box connects to cheaper non-DVR set top boxes around the home, rather than directly to a TV. And uses Rovi’s program guide software to navigate. Quite clearly you need to know what’s on your Pay TV service (say for instance Sky or Virgin) as well as what’s on your multi-room DVR, so you need a clever piece of software to put all the options to you sensibly on an easy to navigate screen.

Subscribers and cable operators will be instantly familiar with the user interface and will be used to ‘watch and record’, pausing live TV, and managing recordings from connected TVs. Which TVs have the rights to “save” programs, and play them back will also have to be sorted out by Pay TV operators and the likely way this comes to market here is through someone like Sky rather than through retail, though there may be retail variants of it for Freeview. No price data has been released so far.

Pace’s reckons its HCS box can distribute nine simultaneous HD streams throughout the home, which just means that its hard drive is that big and that fast. Subscribers will be able to record six HD programs while maintaining full trick play mode (pause and rewind live TV), which is impressive. The HCS software also offers a folder system, a bulk delete tool, and the ability to bookmark playback to resume in another room.

The other thing we can’t yet tell is just how such a box is connected in the home – with MoCA (coax using a special protocol) with HPNA (Coax or twisted pair using another protocol) Wi-Fi (which will drop packets and lose data making for a rough picture – unless it is a new specialized versions of Wi-Fi) or some other way. We suspect that the device will come with all these variations, depending on what operators ask for.

Rovi’s Connected Platform software product is being used to allow cable operators to offer music, video, photos and Internet content, delivered using DLNA, UPnP and DTCP-IP-compliant devices via the home data network.

Yes sure they are acronyms, but DLNA is a set of protocols to make sure that different TVs can interact with one another, while UPnP means that you should be able to just plug devices in and they will work, and DTCP-IP is content protection software which ensures that content cannot be pirated when the program is moving around the home on a cable, which is necessary in order for Sky or Virgin or anyone like them to adopt it.

Pace’s HCS system is up for grabs now for pay TV operators so could be in the field as soon as 6 months from now.