Cable TV plans turn up volume for MoCA

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Cable TV companies are gearing up to offer networked digital video recording services this year, driving what some say could be a five-fold increase in the market for chips based on the standard set by the Multimedia over Coax Alliance. Chip makers Broadcom, Entropic, STMicroelectronics, and possibly NXP, are angling for design wins in set-top boxes to serve the expanding market.

U.S. cable TV providers including Comcast and Cox are expected to roll out multi-room DVR packages later this year based on the MoCA home networking technology. The services let TVs in various rooms link to a single DVR.

It's been a long haul for the MoCA backers who for years have said cable TV operators were just about to adopt the technology. To date Verizon's has led the charge for MoCA, deploying MoCA as part of its Fios broadband service.

"We can see from our bookings and what people are doing with our chips that we have moved beyond this being driven by Verizon and the promise of broader deployments that should be increasingly apparent as the year goes on," said Tom Lookabaugh, chief technology officer of Entropic Communications (San Diego) which until this year has been the sole source of MoCA chips.

"Entropic expects Time Warner, Cox, Brighthouse and Comcast, are likely to drive opportunities for MoCA in 2010 with the market moving from two million units per quarter towards up to 8 to 10 million units per quarter by the end of 2011," according to a report from Barclays Capital.

In February, ABI Research projected that in 2014 as many as 15 million set-top boxes could be equipped with MoCA.

"We are right on the verge" of an offering, said Vince Groff, director of strategy and corporate development at Cox Communications. "We have a multi-room DVR product we are rolling out and a key piece of that is the MoCA technology that connects the set tops," he said.

It's not clear how strong demand could be for the new offerings, Groff said, with predictions of uptake spanning a range from five to 25 percent of cable TV subscribers. However, MoCA plays a larger role in the future plans of cable operators to migrate from hybrid fibre-coax to fibre-to-the-curb networks.

"Longer term we're looking at IPTV and a different architecture in the home that may be more similar to what Verizon uses and would therefore require MoCA in every home," said Groff. "That's a few years out," he added.

The cable providers are to some extent playing catch up. In January, satellite TV provider DirecTv said it will adopt MoCA for a multi-room DVR service in planned to launch in April.

Chip makers are looking to cash in on the growth. Broadcom launched its first MoCA chips in January 2009 at the Consumer Electronics Show. The company now has a line of more than eight MoCA products.

"We believe that Entropic has yet to see any Broadcom products in the market place, but we expect to see deployments in 2H10, with Broadcom exiting 2010 with 10 to 15 percent market share, with closer to 30 to 35 in 2011," said the Barclays report.

Two other chip makers, STM and NXP, are on the board of the MoCA group and may not be far behind. "We are planning to ship products with MoCA shortly," initially as a variant of the STi7108 video decoder for set-top boxes announced at CES in January.

At press time, NXP did not respond to a request for information.

The surge for MoCA comes at a time when the group is preparing to announce its next generation technology, MoCA 2.0. It will support two modes, one with applications layer throughput up to 400 Mbits/s and another with useable throughput up to 800 Mbits/s as is backward compatible with the current version 1.1.

"MoCA 1.1 meets out needs for multiple high definition video streams moving around the home, but people are now talking about stereo 3-D HD, and who knows what the next resolution will be," said Groff of Cox who also sits on the MoCA board.

"The technology issues [for supporting the new data rates] do not seem to be too big at this point," said Lookabaugh of Entropic.