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WACS700 music center
Main article media centers Main article media centers
“The harsh market reality is that in the world of the 21st century digital consumer, the content
is king,” says Erik Kaashoek, responsible at Philips Consumer Electronics (CE) for
migrating Philips Research projects into viable commercial products for CE. “Therefore any
future consumer media center product – if it is to enjoy universal success – needs to put the
needs of the consumer and their desire to intuitively access and organize this digital content
fi rst, and allow the implementation to follow second. Mass-market consumers simply
won’t buy into tomorrow’s media centers if they don’t continue to make their lives
dramatically easier and can accommodate every form of digital media and content
without introducing complexity.”
Together we can achieve more
“The problem is that the engineering and fi nancial resources required to sustain media center
innovation at its current rate is growing exponentially,” notes Frank van Tuijl, R&D project
leader for media centers with Philips Research.
In fact, it is a massive challenge, even for companies the size of Philips, and not without a
huge element of risk. Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. By working together, CE companies
could distribute the technological development and fi nancial burden and achieve far more
for the consumer.
“Recent evolutions of many traditional PC and consumer electronics products are beginning
to encroach on each other’s territories,” illustrates van Tuijl. “Both the games console and PC
products offer video and music playback, and hard drive set-top boxes provide secure on-line
MCP9350i media center
shopping, pay-per-view video and TV programming. And there are even hard drive-based
audiovisual products that include PC operating systems with digital hub-like multi-room
interface capabilities.”
“However, all these products have evolved along separate paths to deliver certain specifi c
functionality supremely well, and have then been adapted – almost as an afterthought,” explains
van Tuijl. “This inevitably compromises the product for attempting to do more than was
originally intended by conventional re-use or re-cycling of established software and standards.”
“That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with software re-cycling and sharing – it’s
commercially vital and actually what the Open Media Center aims to conserve and promote.
But it’s at the multiple – rather than single – PC/CE vendor scale that we’ll see the whole
market migrating in a new direction and developing new software better suited to the universal
media center ideal.”
Indeed, that the current products have successfully evolved from previous products is
testament to the pragmatism and design skill of the PC and CE manufacturers. But it also
suggests that no one is willing to risk developing a bespoke universal media center solution
alone – it’s just too expensive.
“It would demand tens to hundreds of millions of Euros in R&D investment – particularly on
the software side,” says van Tuijl. “And individual companies would have to master unfamiliar
technology if they hoped to create a media center that was truly all things to all users.
Even a company the size of Philips cannot be an expert in all the required disciplines.”
Towards an Open Media Center approach
Frank van Tuijl’s research team has already spent several years of exhaustive investigation
within Philips Research into media centers. “We realize we will fi nd it very challenging to
develop universal next-generation media centers on our own,” van Tuijl says. “Yet media
centers are an enormous part of the future of consumer electronics that simply cannot be
ignored. Industry collaboration is the only viable way forward to migrate existing product
offerings into a harmonized, universal solution.”
This is how the Philips ‘Open Media Center’ idea was born. “It’s a concept centered around a
strategic, industry-wide collaboration involving an open source type of approach that we want
to openly propose to the world’s consumer electronics companies,” explains Erik Kaashoek.
“It’s a completely new paradigm. One built from the ground up to meet the needs of the end
application and that – who knows – could one day be extended to encompass a thriving open
source community as well?”
But it’s early days yet for the Open Media Center. “It’s a vision with no predetermined
architecture or technology road maps,” says Kaashoek, “but a vision that we believe is of
paramount importance to the CE sector. It will encourage the strategic migration of the best
features of each area of the industry into a new common, unifi ed framework for the future.”
The operating system for an Open Media Center (OMC) product would also likely be based on
a non-proprietary OS such as Linux, with the joint development middleware in the center, and
major proprietary application plug-ins on top that could possibly be extended to include opensource
products as well (perhaps like shareware and freeware software in the PC world sits
The ‘mythical’
set-top box
At the recent Consumer Electronics
Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Philips
demonstrated a tablet TV front-end
wirelessly streaming SDTV
(Standard-Defi nition TV) digital video
from a so-called ‘MythTV‘ hub using the
latest state-of-the-art, low-power Philips
Semiconductor technology. A second TV
front-end has also been developed that
receives HDTV (High-Defi nition TV)
streams from the same hub over
Ethernet and displays them on a HDTV.
Nexperia is the Philips brand for a unique
group of products that streamline
development of next-generation,
connected multimedia appliances.
MythTV is a General Public License
(GPL) based, but proprietary ’plug-in‘
software product that allows developers
to create an experimental ’home media
convergence box‘ using open-source
software and operating systems.
“MythTV’s capabilities include pause,
fast-forward and rewind of live TV;
installation of multiple video capture
cards to record more than one program
at a time to different hard disks, and
support of multiple front-end clients
each with a common view of all
available programs,” explains Eric
Persoon of Philips Advanced
Semiconductors Laboratories. “The
software also includes other useful
functionality such as a picture-viewing
application, a DVD viewer and a music
playing application that supports MP3.”
The CES application was based on the
Nexperia STB810 semiconductor system
solution. This combines the Philips
PNX8550 home entertainment engine, a
Linux operating system and all required
AV codecs. The result is a unit that
can provide video telephony, time-shift
recording, DVD playback, personal video
recording, network connectivity and
Voice-over-IP.
8 Philips Research Password 26 l February 2006 Philips Research Password 26 9
l February 2006