Skyworth Digital and SURE Universal turn the STB into a Smart Home gateway

Thursday, September 13th, 2018
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Skyworth Digital and SURE Universal Announce a Pioneering Smart Home IoT Solution for Broadband Operators

  • Complete, standard-compliant solution combines rich feature set, maximum flexibility, and ease-of-use for operators and consumers

RAI AMSTERDAM – IBC2018 — Skyworth Digital Ltd, a leading provider of customer premises equipment for Telco and Cable operators, and SURE Universal Ltd, a pioneering IoT software developer, have announced a Smart Home IoT solution for Operators. The collaboration between the two companies transforms the standard Set-Top Box (STB) hardware into a comprehensive and innovative Smart Home solution, enabling operators to harness the global growth opportunities driven by 5G and IoT.

The smart home solution developed by Skyworth Digital and SURE Universal leverages Android STB as a universal gateway for the Smart Home, and provides customers with the richest set of features available today. It supports local control and monitoring of home appliances over WiFi and Z-Wave wireless technologies, as well as direct control of legacy appliances with Infra-Red (IR) blaster. The IoT solution also enables true remote control from outside of the home, using a mobile app and a cloud connection to the STB gateway. Google Home and Google Voice are supported for convenient voice control of smart home devices.

Specifically designed for broadband operators, the solution provides a robust, standard compliant platform that does not lock customers into a single hardware vendor for Smart Home devices. The solution features an easy-to-use remote control smartphone app, a cloud server for connectivity and user data, STB-based appliance server with a software bridge for various radio protocols. The complete Smart Home solution includes a customizable set of smart home devices using off-the-shelf components. The IoT cloud-server uses standard-compliant, open-source software components and therefore can be hosted on the operator cloud hardware delivering a private cloud IoT solution for operators. Both companies are members of the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF). The SURE Universal software is OCF-certified, providing operators with the flexibility and confidence that their Smart Home solution is interoperable and future-proof.

“Skyworth Digital invests heavily on technology research and development and has a strong focus on innovation. With recent developments related to the “Internet of Everything”, Skyworth Digital has renewed its focus on devices for the smart home leveraging all the products and services available from the Skyworth Group” said Charlie Zheng, VP of Marketing and Strategy at Skyworth Digital. “Through the collaboration with Sure Universal, Skyworth Digital is offering the first complete, standard-compliant Smart Home solution for operators,” Charlie added.

“SURE Universal has developed the only OCF-certified software solution for Smart Home and IoT which allows all devices to be controlled from one integrated platform,” said Viktor Ariel, CEO of Sure Universal. “We are honored to cooperate with Skyworth and turn their industry-leading Set Top Box into the heart of a state-of-the-art IoT solution for operators and consumers,” he said.

The complete Smart Home solution by Skyworth Digital and SURE Univeral is presented at IBC Hall 1, Booth D15.