On Trade Shows and Dev Boards
I attended the China Content Broadcasting Network (CCBN) Exhibition here in Beijing last weekend. The place was packed with booth after booth in hall after hall of video equipment used to record, edit, transmit, receive, and play television.
The show was great for me, because I’ve spent gobs of time in the past few weeks trying to get my hands on set-top box development boards so we can port NthCode Player to the set top box chipsets potential customers are asking me about.
To make that a bit clearer, when you buy a cable or satellite TV box or DVD player, the circuit board inside is typically a cost-reduced version of the development board manufactured by the company that makes the CPU chipset. The development boards support everything the chipset can do (two TV tuners, 5 USB ports, a hard disk adapter, multiple network ports, etc.), only a subset of which is needed for any given product. By porting our software to those development boards, we are a big step closer to being able to sell NthCode Player to manufacturers.
Luckily, just about every chipset vendor in the business was at CCBN. So I talked to the folks at Broadcom, Haier, HiSilicon (Huawei), NEC, NXP, ST Micro, and Zoran. The two notable companies that were not there are MediaTek and Sigma Designs. And I already had useful discussions with one of those two before the show.
I’ll get into what I learned in a bit, but first, a bit about booths.
Trade booths are generally designed to be eye catching and get people inside talking to marketing and sales people. Tactics vary: Panasonic showed their 108-inch LCD and Sony had a halter-top clad Princess Mananoke model. However, most booths at CCBN looked like a nice, well-staffed electronics store.
The most interesting booth of the show goes to Broadcom, the number one set-top box chipset company in North America. It was a sizeable, but not too large, walled area with the Broadcom logo pasted around it, a single closed door, and a desk with three women from marketing to qualify anyone who came by as being worthy enough to go inside.
Their booth was intimidating enough that I didn’t even approach them until the second day I was there.
When I did finally get the courage to approach, I asked one of the women at the counter if it was really a booth, and she replied, “Oh, it’s just private meeting rooms.” (If you are thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to set up private meeting rooms at a hotel?” you are correct.) I told her a bit about NthCode Player and walked her through the details in my product flyer. She asked for my card and to wait a moment, went inside — carefully closing the door behind her — and came out a few minutes later with a colleague of hers.
He and I talked (outside the booth) for about five to ten minutes about NthCode Player, our business model, and what Broadcom and Broadcom’s customers are looking for. I’m not going to spill the beans, other than to say it was insightful. Yes, I will send him a follow-up email later.
Intel Inside?
The most frustrating booth of the show goes to Intel. They showed off their new set-top box chips with a ping-pong game playable on a Wii-like wireless controller. I wanted to find out some details and meet a contact, but, unfortunately did not, because the people wearing Intel shirts didn’t actually work for Intel, and told me that the Intel people had all left.
So I explained who I was, showed them our flyer, and asked, “Could you please give this to them when they come back and ask them to contact me if they think our product is of interest?” The answer: “I’m not sure if I can do that.”
Ugh.
ST Microelectronics
While talking with the set-top box manufacturers at the show, I quickly learned that ST Microelectronics was the number one chip supplier to the industry.
I searched my pamphlet and saw that ST had a small booth at CCBN and so headed over to find out what chips they had, which ones were powerful enough to run NthCode Player, and who I could talk to about development boards.
I talked with their one person manning the booth, and, after a short while, he said, “I’m just an engineer, you should go see this person at the hotel,” and he handed me a map to the Sheraton down the road, where ST had rented out an entire floor.
That was the highlight of the show, because ST, unlike everyone else, is trying to build an ecosystem of suppliers who can provide software components to the companies making products with their chips.
And ST’s high-level guy was happy to meet me and wants to get me a development board. I just need to sign some paperwork.
Yes, I will follow-up with him, ASAP.
So, other than development boards, what did I learn?
Overall, there things: First, DVD player and set-top box makers as well as cable and satellite service providers want to connect their devices to home networks and web-based services at HD resolution, which is exactly what NthCode Player does. Second, the latest chipsets for these boxes all look to have enough raw horsepower to run our software. Third, the traditional model of creating software for set-top boxes is to have a design house do it all, and what we’ve put together is a bit too complex for what the design houses are typically capable of doing (for now).
The other good thing was the feedback I received from folks in the industry about NthCode Player. There are some details I need to adjust and improve in our positioning and product definition, and I will do that.
But that’s minor compared to the need to get NthCode Player up and running on these development boards.
And, with everyone I talked to last weekend, we are now a step closer to reaching that important objective.
