MANHASSET, N.Y. — Get ready for Pause TV, a television receiver equipped with flash memory that lets TV viewers to pause for a fridge break or rewind in mid-broadcast for instant replays.
A new TV prototype capable of pausing live TV broadcasts without the use of a hard disk drive is about to debut, according to industry sources, as early as next month at IFA, the world's largest consumer electronics trade show in Berlin. Commercial products are expected to reach the consumer market later this year or early 2008.
Without revealing manufacturers currently developing Pause TV, several consumer chip vendors have told EE Times that Pause TV represents a new product category that is being promoted to the current TV market. Magnum Semiconductor already has a Pause TV reference design and is talking with several customers, according to the company.
"A pause TV won't record a full movie, but it enables 'pause' and 'replay'—some of the most popular functions of today's personal video recorders" (PVR), said Magnum CEO Jack Guedj. Added Mark Singer, Magnum's director of corporate marketing: "Pause TV will add to the TV set the first new, everyday feature in a long time."
While Mobilygen has yet to launch a Pause TV reference platform, Chris Day, senior vice president sales and marketing at Mobilygen, acknowledged that it plans to offer OEMs a platform with several memory options, including flash memory, DRAM or hard-disk drives.
The Pause TV concept is not new. Day said CE manufacturers have contemplated Pause TV, but for various reasons haven't yet brought it to the market.
Now, two factors favor its introduction: the rapidly sinking price of flash memory and and a new generation of codecs like H.264, that can transcode the video stream and store more video into a limited flash memory.
Integrating flash memory into a TV isn't a technical problem, but a closer look at its implementation reveals several thorny design issues. The least of these is choosing the right kind of flash memory, and figuring out how much memory is needed. "It's determined by a number of variables," said Singer, including: the life expectancy of a TV set and the flash memory (measured in write cycles); how much pause time is enough; how often the same memory cell can be rewritten; and the video bit rate used for storage.
The crux of the issue is memory life expectancy. In a Pause TV application, each second of viewed broadcast TV needs to be written to flash since the system doesn't know when a user might hit the pause button.
Typically, flash memory doesn't last as long as a TV. Moreover, wear and tear on a flash memory inside a TV is determined by how many hours per day a family watches TV, and how long the set is expected to last. Combining statistics on typical household TV use compiled by the U.S Energy Star program and Consumer Electronics Association and Nielsen survey, Magnum set a lifetime target for its Pause TV design of "10 years when a TV is on for 5.5 hours per day—2,000 hours per year," said Singer.
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