IMS Research Analyst Blog

Stephen Froehlich, Senior Analyst

The SCTE Cable-tec expo last week was one of those wonderful, well-attended, but quiet shows where there were few surprises and a ton of real work being done to actually deploy disruptive technologies, including TV gateways & thin clients, multiscreen TV, and some amazing developments in the world of new cable modem front ends and new CMTS & Edge QAM architectures.

One thing that was new at the show was how quickly all of the major players in TV middleware are moving to HTML-5. OpenTV (Kuldeski) was already well on the path to HTML-5, but NDS was showing a version of its advanced Snowflake UI that had been ported from Flash to HTML-5. EchoStar and SeaChange also had HTML-5 based interfaces on display. The progress was impressive enough that I am thinking of advancing my forecast for HTML-5 remote UI from 2015 to 2013-2014.

What really caught my attention, though, is that nobody is trying to form some separate standards body to govern HTML-5-for-TV. Instead, the major players have increased their participation in the W3C directly, making that body the standards body for TV remote user interface. If I stop and think about it for a second or two, this is exactly as it should be in an increasingly web-converged world.

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