India's InCablenet Deploys Entropic Set-Top Box System-on-a-Chip

India’s Leading Cable Operator, InCablenet, Deploys Entropic’s Proven Set-Top Box System-on-a-Chip Technology to Rapidly Embrace ‘Analog Sunset’ Requirements; Entropic’s Cost-Effective Silicon Solution Reduces Time-to-Market, Costs and Subscriber Churn for InCablenet

NEW DELHI, India — Entropic (Nasdaq:ENTR), a world leader in semiconductor solutions for the connected home, today announced its set-top box (STB) system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology, the CX2448x, has been deployed by India’s leading cable multi-system operator (MSO), InCablenet. By deploying Entropic’s STB SoC, InCablenet can enable advanced digital broadcast and broadband services to the 8.5 million cable-connected TV homes they serve across India.

Fulfilling the Digitization Roadmap with Entropic

Termed ‘analog sunset,’ India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) publicly announced the complete switchover from analog to digitized signals must occur countrywide by December 2014. Additionally, the mandate states that each TV set in the home, rather than each home itself, must now have a digital STB.

InCablenet turned to Entropic’s CX2448x as an affordable STB SoC solution to meet these digitization mandates. By deploying Entropic-based Novabase STBs, InCablenet gains access to a state-of-the-art solution with advanced features such as DVR capability that will give them a competitive edge throughout the digitization transition.

“India’s cable TV market is poised for a broad network upgrade to provide compelling, interactive and affordable digital services to more than 130 million subscribers,” said Mr. Ravi Mansukhani, managing director, IMCL (IndusInd Media & Communications Ltd.), which owns InCablenet. “This opportunity has led us to strategic partners like Entropic, who have a reputable local presence with Standard-Definition SoCs, can minimize new product time-to-market with pre-established Conditional Access relationships, and can help us increase revenue by enabling value-added digitization services.”

“Given the ‘analog sunset’ timeframe and the number of potential set-top boxes to be deployed, we worked closely with Entropic to customize a silicon solution for InCablenet’s client devices,” said Michael Pauli, managing director of Novabase Digital TV. “Our set-top boxes leverage Entropic’s advanced silicon and software, which allowed us to focus on delivering a product-to-market quickly while ensuring flexibility, functionality, and cost optimization all remained high priorities.”

STB Features Reduce Overall Time-to-Market, Costs and Customer Churn

The CX2448x offers high levels of performance in a format that saves space, reduces the external component count, cuts design time, and lowers overall cost – all of which were extremely appealing to InCablenet, given the wide-scale deployment required to meet the I&B’s initiative.

Mr. Mansukhani stated, “Entropic proved to be the ideal STB SoC technology partner for us, as the Company offers a proven solution with international deployments by Tier-1 MSOs. They also understood our need to stay ahead of the competition, by enabling new consumer services to minimize subscriber churn.”

The Entropic SoC had several security features including advanced Conditional Access (CA) integration with Nagra for unprecedented levels of protection against piracy; an advanced one-time-programmable (OTP) memory technology to personalize individual STBs with unique serial numbers and encryption keys; and uses embedded cryptographic technology for secure authentication of any STB system software loaded into the Flash memory.

“With India’s cable TV market undergoing a massive digital transformation, we are working with InCablenet to seamlessly migrate their subscribers from analog to digital cable,” said Mark Samuel, senior vice president and general manager, Set-top Box Group, Entropic. “We understand the market in India, and coupled with our field-proven, cost-optimized set-top box system-on-a-chip solution we are confident we can rapidly assist InCablenet in their wide-scale network upgrade to satisfy the growing needs of its subscriber base.”

About Entropic’s CX2448x Family

Built around a 32-bit ARM®926 CPU, running at up to 300 MHz and capable of delivering 330 MIPS, Entropic’s Cx2448x includes a QAM demodulator, a programmable transport stream processor, an MPEG-2 audio/video decoder, and an advanced graphics hardware accelerator, among other features.