Frbiz Forecasts Future Development Trends in Set-Top Box Devices

BEIJING — Frbiz.com, one of China’s leading B2B search platforms, forecasts future development trends in set-top box devices.

For the television industry, digital set-top boxes are thought of as a transitional product that will gradually be replaced by built-in digital TV receiver machines. These machines will serve the same function. However, when focusing on future development, the function of set-top boxes could be further evolved for use as a family information center — working on existing computers, media players, home entertainment centers, home appliances, security monitors and other services. In particular, the emergence of the concept of triple-play, linking high speed internet, television and telephone over a single broadband connection via the use of a set-top box, could inject new vitality into the set-top box market.

Over the past year, STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) has been the digital set-top box chip market leader. Last year, ST’s leading position was shaken. In the economic crisis, low-end set-top boxes are becoming more competitive, which is not a small blow for ST, a company that focuses on the high-end market; however, the slightly improved current market conditions have awakened a demand for higher end set-top boxes.

As for overall set-top box chip development, Frbiz believes that, with the advancement of technology, the value of each set-top box will increase year by year, while the market will gradually see the emergence of a set of networks, games, multimedia processing capabilities and in-home entertainment terminal trends. For example, in the Chinese digital television market, there is an ongoing shift from standard definition to high definition. ST is continuously improving product performance in this vein while minimizing power consumption. In particular, set-top box products’ standby power is being reduced, helping achieve the maximum reduction of a user’s ecological footprint.

ST currently supports an H.264 bit stream processing chip platform for a third-generation set-top box. The STi7108 uses an ARMMali-400 graphics processor, and has introduced such functional highlights as 3D polygons, video textures, procedural textures, elimination of jagged distortion, high resolution graphics and large screen displays, etc. This matches with ST’s specific Faroudja technology that can achieve Internet video high-definition picture quality processing. In addition, digital set-top boxes also face more important security issues, in this regard, ST’s platform has been able to achieve conditional access, system data integrity, digital rights management, watermarking techniques and output port protection for security measures.