Home gateway applications under the pan-intelligentization of home terminals

Pai Pai Zuo: Home Smart Terminal

Since the invention of television, it has always occupied an important position in family life. For a long time, it has become the core endpoint of family media entertainment services and often serves as the background and source of communication between family members. Its implicit sense of ritual still exists today. This determines the specific position of television terminals in home intelligence in the next few decades, as well as the various entanglements that come with it.

In the context of broadband, the emergence and popularization of PCs, especially the rapid rise of Internet video websites, began to transfer and assume some of the functions of home entertainment. But soon, the development of intelligent and large-screen mobile terminals greatly magnified the personal entertainment component in the home context, especially greatly diverting the entertainment and media service functions of PCs, becoming an important endpoint of home media entertainment.

At the same time, efforts to connect TV terminals to the Internet to expand the scope and influence of entertainment services have always existed. The "Venus Project" at the beginning of this century and the "Shanda Box" around 2005 played the role of cannon fodder. This period of history is short, but it profoundly demonstrates the implicit cross-border service impulses and interest demands of different roles in the industrial chain in the wave of digital economy, as well as the ideological control requirements of regulators. In fact, this period of history also reveals many internal laws. The author defines this period as the " prequel to the smart box ."

The IPTV service, which began to rise around 2007, started with the cooperation between telecom operators and licensees, and fully demonstrated the development path with Chinese characteristics in the subsequent three-party game. In the complex digital and two-way transformation process, cable operators also strive to make cable digital TV look more colorful through set-top boxes. But it is Internet TV, also known as OTT TV, that really breaks the shackles and connects TV terminals with the digital economy. It is interesting that in the tortuous development of OTT TV regulation and anti-regulation, just like the "smart box prequel", color TV manufacturers are the original initiators of OTT TV (sadly, color TV manufacturers are not beneficiaries either), while Internet companies have pushed this imported product to a climax and entered a period of collective riot .

In addition to the above-mentioned "three screens", the public focus of home intelligence in recent years also includes routers and game consoles. The sudden outbreak of game consoles is more due to the relaxation of policy blockades for many years. After all, after years of development of the Internet and mobile Internet, games have been identified as an application field with a real money business model. As for the so-called smart router, in terms of product functions, the "micro-innovation" functions such as video download acceleration engine and content storage advocated by some players are actually a CDN node service for home users; that is to say, the smart router is a device that "circles users" in the place closest to the user; and its further application aggregation and smart home platform conception are its platform business goals. The author believes that: smart routers are a point of reliance for emerging players in the process of seeking new entrances under the pressure of the three giants BAT.

If we ignore the smart homes that are still in the development stage (the author believes that they cannot be called "smart" at this stage, but are more of "functional" applications in certain networked environments), PCs, mobile smart terminals, all-in-one smart TVs, various TV boxes, smart routers, and game consoles; these terminals constitute the main smart terminals in the home.

Home Gateway: From Integration to Fusion

From the perspective of the home network service function and rich media service function emphasized by smart routers, the author believes that smart routers are likely to be just an intermediate form, an intermediate product when the big players such as network owners, media controllers (and consumers) have not yet awakened or really exerted their strength. When the so-called three-network integration is further promoted, when the relevant giants, that is, the real operating service providers, further deploy and close the battle line, whether it is telecom operators, cable network operators or OTT big players, they will extend the routing function and home terminal interconnection function on the basis of strengthening the rich media function of their own terminal products. Judging from the recent development trend, the home media gateway (Media Gateway) is likely to be such a strategic product.

Bridge between cloud platform and multiple intelligent terminals

In fact, organizations including some upstream giants and network operators have begun to deploy gateway products. For example, during the ICTC in July 2012, STMicroelectronics (ST) brought three levels of products to the Chinese radio and television market, of which the third category was home media gateways and server products. Laurent Remont, Vice President of STMicroelectronics and General Manager of Unified Platform Products: "More and more applications are deployed in the cloud, which will bring great investment and cost pressure to operators. Cloud applications and home multimedia gateways can be balanced, some in the cloud and some in the home. Another important application is to provide a 'cloud' at home, which is completed with a home gateway." Users can put content on the home media cloud server. It can be accessed at home or outdoors, and all content is in its own control center - the home cloud.

For example, in October 2013, Intel announced a gateway product for the home Internet of Things and also launched a gateway solution based on it. Ton Steenman, vice president of Intel's Global Internet of Things Solutions Division, said: The Internet of Things consists of objects (sensors, chips), gateways, network connections, and cloud/data centers. The object part is a very fragmented part. The gateway is responsible for integrating the information collected by different objects, the network transmits the information between the various parts, and the cloud/data center is responsible for analysis and providing solutions. Among them, as a very important core, the gateway is a bridge between the "fragmentation" of the object side and the "centralized control" of the cloud side , which is of great significance.

Also around mid-2013, Real initially launched home media center products. Real installed the media center (Server) application in digital all-in-one machines or set-top boxes, and also provided client (Clien) applications for mobile smart terminals. The above product combination forms a "private cloud" service for home users , in which the Server can use the hardware capabilities of the all-in-one machine or set-top box to provide efficient media content editing and processing capabilities, including encoding and transcoding; terminal users can obtain relevant media services from the Server, and can also upload the media information on their terminals to the Server, so as to share it with other home " private cloud " users.

The three cases mentioned above have one thing in common, that is, the home gateway serves as a transition between the "cloud" service platform of the operator service provider and multiple smart terminals of the home user, or a home "private cloud". On the one hand, as the service deployment endpoint of the operator service provider in the home environment, the home gateway can provide flexible rich media service output. On the other hand, the home gateway can distribute services to multiple smart terminals in the home.

Defining home network boundaries and improving software capabilities

More importantly, typical home gateway products define the boundaries of the home network and focus on investing in software capabilities rather than hardware capabilities.

As shown in Figure 1, in the product definition of Guangdong Radio and Television's home gateway, the home gateway receives broadcast and television video services from the wired network and distributes them in an IP manner (based on routing capabilities and home networking capabilities), covering broadcast programs and on-demand programs to all home smart terminals. In other words, before the home gateway, it belongs to the wired network, and the traditional broadcast and television video service attributes are terminated in the home gateway; after the home network, it belongs to the home network category. The home gateway converts the non-IP signals of the wired network (such as TS streams) into IP streams that can be recognized by home smart terminals through services such as transcoding. In this way, the home gateway can enable the broadcast and television video services to be flexibly connected with the home network and home smart terminals. Under this definition, the home gateway is the end of the wired network entering the home, and the operation and service capabilities of the cable network operator will revolve around the home gateway, rather than the user's home network itself.

Figure 1: Product positioning of Guangdong Radio and Television's home gateway

In terms of operation and maintenance support, the home gateway is presented in the form of a thin terminal and a soft terminal. In other words, the home gateway is not responsible for the heaviest service presentation, but provides services to various home smart terminals with service presentation capabilities, and realizes the heaviest service presentation based on the latter's hardware capabilities - while providing QoS guarantees and appropriate terminal management capabilities. For example, cable network operators used one, two, or even three set-top boxes to achieve home multi-terminal coverage in the early days. After the introduction of the home gateway, the IP transcoding and routing capabilities of the gateway can directly achieve home multi-terminal coverage and service provision, including mobile terminals. In other words, under the home gateway mode, cable network operators will no longer provide set-top boxes to users in a customized manner, but let users buy unified standard set-top boxes on the open market. This can avoid heavy hardware investment; in the context of rapid replacement of hardware such as set-top boxes and smart TV all-in-ones, this solution that emphasizes the software service capabilities of the gateway can avoid a lot of unnecessary hardware investment.

Figure 2: Evolution of Guangdong Radio and Television Gateway Product Form

As shown in Figure 2, the home gateway actually separates the original set-top box's general IT capabilities such as encoding and decoding, graphics processing, storage capabilities, and peripheral components, while retaining and strengthening core capabilities such as operation control capabilities, network access and routing capabilities, and (IP) transcoding capabilities. This is more of a thin terminal or soft terminal concept.

The operational capability of the home gateway is also reflected in its support for refined management of multi-service QoS. For example, the home gateway will prohibit P2P applications for OTT to ensure the quality of the broadcasting and television's own video services. In addition, in terms of scalability, the home gateway supports personalized services such as home security and smart home by supporting interconnection standard protocols such as Zigbee.

It can be seen that traditional set-top boxes, smart TVs, and even smart routers and other smart terminals, when competing for home entrances, are more likely to seek replacements based on the integration of software and hardware capabilities; while home gateways use or integrate the hardware capabilities of other smart terminals based on strengthening their own software operation and service capabilities. The author believes that this integration rather than integration and replacement thinking is the core competitiveness of home gateway products.

Home smart war: hardware performance VS software efficiency?

With the support of 3C integration and SOC, smart consumer electronic products have rapidly emerged and become a new information portal; at the same time, it has also led to a competition among smart devices for user control. In the home field, smart terminals including smart TVs, OTT boxes and smart mobile terminals are all seeking to become the core of the home information portal. In order to compete for information portals, Internet companies, especially those represented by Xiaomi, LeTV and Alibaba, have intervened in smart terminal services and provided high-end and low-priced products.

However, under the "post-Moore's Law", the relative excess of hardware manufacturing capacity has actually accelerated the pace of hardware upgrades. In this case, the attempt to attract users by transferring high-level hardware capabilities is actually difficult to maintain in the long run. On the other hand, the rise of various smart terminals actually means a "decentralized" pattern. Any attempt to control users and become the core information portal of the family will ultimately fail.

On the contrary, more and more facts show that software performance is a more important competitive advantage than hardware capabilities. In December 2010, a report released by an independent panel of White House science and technology advisers cited the conclusion of a study. The conclusion shows that the continuous improvement of software algorithms often far exceeds the performance benefits brought by the use of faster processors. The report shows that in the past 15 years, the speed of computing has increased by 43 million times, of which 1,000 times came from the increase in processor speed and 43,000 times came from the improvement in software algorithm efficiency. In this case, for operating service providers, improving operational efficiency and user stickiness based on software capabilities will be a more important way than hardware bundling.

The cable network operator's conception of the above-mentioned home gateway product is to abandon the burden of hardware capabilities, and make full use of the hardware capabilities of the user's own smart terminal on the basis of improving service flexibility (mainly reflected in IP transcoding) and extending the service scope (covering a variety of terminals). In other words, the above-mentioned home gateway product returns the ownership and control of the smart terminal hardware to the user, allowing the user to independently choose the access terminal.

Philosophical thinking: When the family encounters digitalization

In the eyes of economists, individuals, families and institutions (including enterprises, governments and non-profit organizations) are the core entities of the economic system. In the Internet wave that has lasted for nearly 20 years, the combination of digital economy and these four entities is also different. With entertainment and communication as the core driving force and mobile Internet as an important form of expression, the degree of individual Internetization has been getting closer and closer to the peak level; and the wearable devices currently being advocated may be the extreme of individual Internetization. For enterprises and government agencies, management efficiency (including vertical management and collaborative management) and security and control have always been the core driving forces of their digitalization; driven by the Internet of Things technology, the level of digitalization of institutions has also begun to reach a new level.

Different from individuals and institutions, families have more diversified needs in the process of digitalization: they have needs for entertainment and communication, as well as safety, reliability, and internal management. Moreover, as a family entity based on blood relations, all its related activities are under a specific emotional pattern. Therefore, when digitalization encounters the family entity, its process and development direction appear to be more complex and diversified.

In a word, in the context of individualism prevailing and personal ethical norms tending to be disordered, family ethics is still the most stable force and source of order in society; or in other words, the family entity is more self-organizing. Therefore, any attempt to rely on technology to change or even subvert the status quo of family daily life will encounter huge challenges!

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.