Motorola Unveils Strategy for Moving Digital Media Throughout the Home (press release)

Thursday, June 30, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: digital media, health news, Natural News

https://www.naturalnews.com/009072.html

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At the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Cable-Tec Expo (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, San Antonio), Motorola, Inc. (NYSE:MOT) unveiled a unified hardware and software strategy that will enable digital cable customers to move and share digital media throughout their homes.

As the leading provider of digital video solutions for the cable industry, Motorola's strategy of integrating its all-digital set-tops with home media networking software presents operators with a compelling, cost-efficient path for increasing the advanced digital services they offer to subscribers.

Robust Software Platform Enables Sharing of Media Throughout The Home

Motorola's software strategy for whole-home media takes advantage of the industry-leading Ucentric Digital Home Platform, acquired by Motorola earlier this year. This suite of applications enables seamless access to digital entertainment -- such as recorded video on a set-top, music on a computer hard drive, or pictures on a laptop -- stored on any connected device in the home.

Because of the growing momentum for the open cable applications platform (OCAP), Motorola plans to offer extensions for OCAP that will enable operators to tap into the robust networking capabilities of the Motorola Ucentric platform by Summer 2006. This will enable cable operators to take advantage of features such as the sharing of tuners and storage across the network from within their own custom OCAP applications.

All-Digital Set-Tops Extend the Whole-Home Media Network

Motorola's hardware strategy begins with the introduction of the DCT3412, an all-digital, dual-tuner, high-definition digital video recorder. This model, along with its sister set-top (the widely deployed Motorola DCT6412, which also includes analog recording), can serve as the centerpiece of a whole-home media network. With operator-selectable hard drive sizes (120GB, 160GB, 320GB), this product can serve hours of digital recordings, along with music, pictures, and more, to any room in the home.

Motorola will also offer a sneak peek at cost-effective, all-digital set- top concepts designed for secondary rooms in the home. These products will support OCAP and the Ucentric Digital software, and include built-in adapters that will enable the creation of a whole-home network as easy as connecting a coaxial cable to the set-top.

These products will include a "proxied" DOCSIS(R) set-top gateway (DSG) feature that can simplify the operator's ability to administer multiple set- tops in the home. With this functionality, operators can independently access each set-top attached to the home media network through a single cable modem.

"An integrated all-digital and OCAP software strategy allows our operator customers to offer a seamless access experience within their consumers' homes on a platform that offers maximum flexibility and reduced costs," said John Burke, Motorola corporate vice president and general manager, consumer entertainment solutions. "It also affords them an all-digital solution that efficiently reclaims bandwidth and gets valuable features and functionality, like DVR, into the second and third rooms in the home."