Mastering the Metadata Menace: How Metadata Mismanagement is Slowing the Delivery of Digital Services to the Set-Top-Box

Colin Dixon — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:30:24 GMT

Description
Product Category: Market dBrief™
Price: $0
Release Date: 2006 Q2
Author: Colin Dixon
Pages: 14
Figures: 3

Summary

This Market dBrief™ looks at the challenges of delivering advanced services to the Set-top box (STB). Specifically covered are the challenges within the current Interactive Program (IPG) and application environment, the increasing amount of metadata, and how various solutions are seeking to solve this problem (and often falling short).

From the Report:

After many years of relative stability in delivering television services to the home, today's PayTV operators now face some of the most significant challenges of their tenure - both from a technological and business perspective.

With the "heavy-lifting" of network upgrades virtually complete in cable and fully underway in Telco and satellite, operators are now focused on leveraging these high-bandwidth architectures to roll out new digital services to their customers - services such as Video-on-Demand (VOD), Personal Video Recording (PVR) and Voice over IP. However, there remains a significant and virtually intractable problem that Multiple-Service Operators (MSOs) must address (and soon): delivering applications for the in-home Set-top Box.

Table of Contents

    1.0    Introduction
    2.0    The Evolving STB Application Environment
                2.1    The Early Days
                2.2    Today's STB Application Environment
    3.0    Today's Metadata Management Challenge
                3.1    IPG Architecture & Metadata Management
                3.2    The Impact of Application Metadata
                            Mismanagement
    4.0    New STB Technologies Fall Short as Metadata Management
                            Solutions
                4.1    Middleware
                4.2    New STBs
                4.3    Embedded CE Databases
    5.0    Taming the Metadata Management Beast
    6.0    Conclusion

List of Figures

    Figure 1    Basic Architecture of an IPG
    Figure 2    IPG Metadata Sources
    Figure 3    Penetration of New STBs in an Existing Operator
                        System