STMicroelectronics bundles Wyplay Frog client software free with STB SoCs

STMicroelectronics Bundles Wyplay’s Frog Turnkey Pay TV Software Solution for Free with Liege3 Set-Top-Box SoCs

MARSEILLE, France, and GENEVA, Switzerland — Wyplay, creator of software solutions for pay TV operators, and STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, today announced that the Frog Client turnkey solution for connected zappers or personal video recorders (PVR) will be offered free of charge to OEM members of the Frog Community designing their digital TV set-top-box products with ST’s new Liege3 System-on-Chip (SoC) family. This bundled offer may be extended to other ST product families in the future.

As a result of the long-standing strategic relationship between Wyplay and ST, the Frog Client turnkey product has been pre-integrated with ST’s SDK2 Media Framework low-level software environment for the Liege3 family of SoC products. Both companies will showcase this integration at IBC, RAI Amsterdam, 11-15 September, on their respective booths (Wyplay: 5.A25 – ST: 1.F40).

Unveiled at IBC 2015, Liege3 is the ST SoC family for HD HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) entry set-top boxes composed of satellite variants (STiH337/STiH332), cable-market products (STiH372), and IPTV set-top-box devices (STiH302/STiH307). Pin-to-pin compatible and highly scalable, these SoCs integrate ST’s latest IPs and FD-SOI manufacturing process to achieve outstanding multimedia performance and high power efficiency that supports very small fan-less form factors, at price-points that enable large-scale migrations towards HEVC.

The Frog Client turnkey product was announced in June this year at Broadcast Asia. It reuses and extends the core components available in Frog to pack all the features for traditional linear broadcast TV consumption and on-demand content served over the Internet into an integrated software stack with a modern user experience developed using HTML5 technologies. The Connected Zapper and PVR features of this product are now available free of charge for commercial deployments by ST customers that are members of the Frog Community.

This offer aims to bring significant time-to-market and software BoM advantages to set-top-box OEMs that rely on STMicroelectronics’ silicon. In effect, the pre-integrated bundle brings down the time required for an OEM to deliver an operator product to three months and is available from day one of introduction of the new SoC line. This makes the bundle particularly attractive to OEMs addressing growth markets in which operators face significant pressure to introduce modern user experiences and value-added services such as Video-on-Demand or Over-The-Top services, in addition to their analog-to-digital migration plans.

“The Frog Client turnkey software fits perfectly with our Liege3 SoC family,” said Philippe Notton, Group Vice President and General Manager, Consumer Product Division, STMicroelectronics. “Wyplay’s Frog provides all-in-one ready-to-ship middleware with user interface stack, and allows us to harness the richness of the Frog Community that already counts more than 20 set-top-box OEMs.”

“ST’s new Liege3 SoC family meets the needs of OEMs to address all the segments of the very dynamic HD HEVC set-top-box broadcast markets,” said Jacques Bourgninaud, Wyplay CEO. “The ST/Wyplay bundle takes the pain out of the equation for OEMs to quickly deploy competitive products offering modern user experience.”

The pre-integrated Frog Client will be available to Frog Licensee OEMs as a Frog Reference implementation for STiH337/STiH332 (satellite), STiH307/STiH302 (IPTV), and STiH372 (cable). Source code and pre-built binaries will be distributed to all Frog Licensees through the Frog Community Portal (login required).