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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, October 26, 2007

Try selling this at home

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A presentation I attended by comms-infrastructure chip maker Gennum Corp. features a forthcoming consumer-oriented product. The will be offering the silicon to build an HDMI extender. What you’ll have is a powered cable that will take the digital video, serialise it and drive it down some suitable cable – probably coax – and then reconstruct the HDMI at the other end. Up to 30m away.

While getting the point of the technological achievement, I had (still do have) a bit of a problem with the “use model”. Apparently, when I have my full-HD TV sets in different rooms in my home, I might want to share a source, such as an HD disc player, between sets. This paints a picture of the 10, 20 or even 30m of coax connected to the HD player, leading out of the door of that room, trailing up the stairs, through another door and… you get the picture.

A recipe for elegant living, this is not.

Install the cable into the fabric of the home? Not for the first time, we have a communications breakdown between our Californian friends who live in houses made mainly of plywood, and most of us Europeans for whom the mantra “no new wires” has real meaning. Am I going to drill my way through brick, concrete or stone to run new cables just to watch a bit of TV? I don’t think so. In the presentation there was mention of the possibility of “using existing cable infrastructure” – which I take it means attempting to use coax installed in US homes for analogue TV distribution.

Sadly, that cable is probably poor-quality stuff. The HDMI converter silicon may be good but if you are going to launch the signal into coax, patch into unknown-grade coax and out again, with the discontinuities of two or more connections along the way, then good luck to you in getting anything usable at the other end.

If that job needs to be done in the HD-equipped household – and I’m not convinced it does – some form of wireless technology still looks the better bet to me. But there’s no getting away from the fact that even compressed, full-HD video is a substantial data stream.

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