Click here to read Part 1 of the interview.
As a consumer, I can share one broadband connection on several home PCs. Why I am not allowed to share entertainment like that over TVs or other output devices?
Not sure if that is really the case. In the U.S., the consumer can get several STBs for multiple home connections. The satellite or cable TV provider is not charging two or three times per TV. They are charging an incremental amount though you do have to pay for the entire service.
Yes but when you share a broadband connection at home you do not pay incremental charges.
Yes, that is right. There is that difference.
What if the regulators allow multiple TV users within a home without incremental charges? How would that affect your business?
We are not really providing additional links to the WAN per se. What we are doing is allowing the distribution of content inside the home. So it is a totally different model than what you are thinking about.
Your product enables sharing of content within a home. Can it potentially evolve into something like home PBX for voice and video and what do you see the future role of your product?
Basically when a service provider is providing triple play services they do enable multiple home lines into the house in addition to multiple video streams for different TV sets. That market trend is already happening and it really doesn’t impact us much. Our business in digital home entertainment is really designed for the movement of video around house. Once you can do video, you easily integrate other multimedia like data, voice and gaming for example.
In places like India and China, where entertainment is a family affair and shared through one device, what are your business prospects?
The business prospects for us in India and China are more related to our network access product. We do think that especially in China there is a trend toward high-speed broadband access to the home. So that is the broadband side. On the home entertainment side, there isn’t much opportunity in the home for us as there is only one TV per household in most cases.
We are seeing a trend toward a single all-inclusive residential gateway that handles entertainment as well as communications. What is your developmental role in that context?
We are already playing in that market today because residential gateways or broadband home modems are typically connected to home entertainment networks. In the U.S., we are providing MoCA based solutions into these products. We recently acquired a small company in Israel called Arabella Software to bring us additional capabilities in the residential gateway market.