New Orleans, La. -- Last week at the NCTA 2004 here a diverse number of companies, including Motorola, Scientific-Atlanta and Vigoto took the wraps off their conceptions of what the network-enabled home entertainment center will look like.  

And if the three firms and their partners have anything to say about it, the near future of home entertainment centers will feature the widespread use of multi-room digital video recording (DVR) systems.  

Scientific-Atlanta's Multi-Room DVR vision is built around the company's new Explorer 8300 MR-DVR settop, designed to allow consumers to access recorded content on multiple television sets within the home through existing in-home wiring and using existing Explorer digital set-tops.  

According to Michael P. Harney, corporate senior vice president and president of Subscriber Networks, Scientific- Atlanta, the company's 8300 MR-DVR serves as an in-home media server that can be simultaneously accessed by up to 3 other, non-DVR Explorer digital interactive set-tops in the home. 

"In total, individuals in up to 4 different rooms of the home could be watching different recorded programs or in fact, they could be watching the same program, but time shifted at different points in the show," he said.  

Based on the company's digital cable technology which allows encryption of the content and digital transport through existing coax found in the home, the Multi-Room DVR service is currently undergoing beta testing with Time Warner Cable on an undisclosed cable network system.  

Vigoto ups the DVR stakes  

Also showing its wares at the show was Vigoto Inc., which introduced a DVR-enabled digital set-top box that serves all TV sets in the home, also through existing coaxial cable, reducing equipment needs to just one unit per household instead of one set-top box per room.  

Its' VigoBox is hoping to gain a slice of the market by giving cable operators a way of substantially increasing their margins on monthly fees while at the sime time making it possible to equip up to five rooms for a fraction of the price of multiple conventional DVR-enabled units.  

According to Gil Litwinsky, Vigoto Vice President of Marketing, the VigoBox goes beyond currently available DVR features by allowing users to record up to five channels simultaneously from any room in the home, pause a program on one TV set and continue watching it on another.  

"In addition, providers can now offer to record select premium channels daily at specified times on an ongoing basis, eliminating the need for subscribers to program their DVRs for regularly viewed shows," he said. "Supplying, installing and servicing multiple set-top boxes is costly and inefficient for the cable operator. 

In the Vigoto approach, one VigoBox unit is connected to the main TV in the house, while smaller VigoLink interface units are attached to the TV cables in the other rooms for connectivity to the central system and infrared links with the local remote control.

Litwinsky said VigoLink installation does not require removal of an existing VCR or DVD player, simplifying deployment and reducing customer service calls. If all sets are cable- connected, no additional wiring is required.  

He said that each VigoBox unit has a base recording capacity of 140 hours that is expandable according to operator needs. Cable operators can also define the number of simultaneously recordable channels to be included in each box and the number of TV's that will be served in the home, as well as brand and customize the user interface.  

Because each VigoBox unit already has the 200 megabits per second bandwidth, it can support up HDTV for  five television sets, permitting a transition to HDTV simply by upgrading the receiver channel/decoder card. Litwinsky said the VigoBox also includes such features as the ability to record the entire season of a show automatically; enable picture-in-picture views from any TV; and optionally store digital music, photographs and home videos in the VigoBox unit through connectivity to the user's computer.  

A multichannel recording capability also allows consumers to record multiple programs of their choice at the same time without installing a set-top box on every TV. The VigoBox is powered by patent-pending home media networking technology that enables and manages the simultaneous recording and playback of multiple TV streams on a single chip utilizing up to four standard ATA hard disk drives. 

Motorola's DVR-based Home Media Architecture 

Multi-room digital video recording is also at the heart of Motorola Inc.'s Home Media Architecture (HMA), which also incorporates technology from Ucentric Systems Inc. and Entropic Systems Inc.  

According to Carl McGrath, Motorola corporate vice- president and general manager, digital core gateways, the Home Media Architecture is a significant part of the company's "connected home" strategy. 

The HMA incorporates technology from Motorola's partners in this endeavor, Ucentric Systems and Entropic. Ucentric, he said, provides home media networking software based on a Java-based open architecture that enables content recorded on a DCT6208 or DCT6412 digital video recorder set-top to be accessed from any HMA-enabled DCT digital set-top.  

The other contributor to the Motorola hardware/software architecture is Entropic, with an IP-over-coaxial technology developed for the Multimedia over  Coax Alliance (MoCA), that enables multiple standard and high-definition video and data services to be simultaneously distributed throughout the home, over existing unmodified coaxial cable.   

For more about these products, go to www.entropic.com, www.ucentric.com, www.motorola.com/broadband, www.scientificatlanta.com, or www.vigoto.com.

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