Chip-set supplier Broadcom is enjoying what its President/CEO Scott McGregor has described as “significant progress” in its home, hand (telecoms) and infrastructure/data divisions.  “These three core businesses of the company, looking into each of those over the last year, have all made significant progress in each of the areas. In the home business, Broadcom has become the number one market share leader for all of the last mile technologies. So whether it’s satellite or DSL or optical or cable or whatever, anyway of getting information into a home of business Broadcom has really focused on the technology and become number one in that.”

“We think of our business in the home, as primarily focused on set-top box and access. So if you have a set-top box in your house, cable set-top box, satellite set-top box, it probably has Broadcom chips in it. [We are in a] very, very good position there and we benefit from a number of things; one is the increasing penetration of the high-end technologies 4K, 2K, and new technologies in that space.”

McGregor was speaking at JPMorgan’s Global Technology, Media & Telecom event in New York, and explained that Broadcom was seeing the rest of the world moving towards these kinds of architectures.  “For example, we upgrade the STBs and there is a lot of churn in the base as people move from SD to HD, now to Ultra-HD. So new technologies like HEVC enable twice the bandwidth signals in the same amount of spectrum that they have on the cable, which means if you’re cable company we can go to them and say you could double the number of channels, existing channels or you could compress your existing channels down into half of what you use today and free up a whole lot of extra spectrum now to start offering Ultra-HD channels 4Kx2K which is interesting to [our customers].”

“We are agnostic about how is the data delivered and we focus on creating that. Now in the home, we see a trend towards a number of different things. One trend is that people are trying to move the technology that does the constant protection and final decode closer to the TV, okay in terms of dongles and things like that. There is a wonderful new product out from Roku, which is the streaming stick, which is an HDMI Dongle which just fits right into your TV and provides over-the-top capabilities there. That’s an example of moving it all the way to the TV and then over-the-top model.”

He added that the upcoming FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games in Brazil (in 2016) would be important drivers for Ultra-HD. “[Brazil] wants to make sure that by the time the Olympics rolls out, that a reasonable number of their citizens will also be able to watch that on 4K x 2K sets and so they are upgrading the entire country infrastructure all the way to Ultra-HD and so moving from what used to be sort of a sub standard HD kind of architecture all the way to what any of these US companies would be proud of to deploy in the next few years.”

“We are seeing similar things happening in Russia, Eastern Europe, in Africa both in the Middle East and also in South Africa, a lot of things driven there. There is a lot of cable boxes in those countries all upgrading to new technologies that are applicable to us and so an opportunity for share gain for Broadcom in those business.”

Other posts by Chris Forrester:

1. Virgin Galactic in stock split
2. Thuraya-3 suffers major problem
3. AST SpaceMobile hit by Class Action
4. Optimism under threat at SES
5. Rivada visits Terran Orbital’s manufacturing HQ
6. Avanti wins spectrum debt obligation case
7. SpaceX breaks records for re-use launchers
8. IRIS2 already in trouble?
9. Intelsat contemplates next steps

Categories: Blogs, Inside Satellite, Ultra-HD/4K