General

Amino Technologies

Whatever the future of IPTV, Amino Technologies expects to be a key component of its technological genetic code.

by Gerry Blackwell [May 18, 2006]

Amino Technologies plc, a pioneering UK-based software firm, wants to be as fundamental a part of the DNA of IPTV as amino acids are of the human genetic code. The company has arguably been just that to this point. But can Amino maintain the dominance it gained by being one of the first IPTV set top box makers out of the gate? It has made some key moves recently to ensure it does.

Headquartered in Swavesey near Cambridge University, the alma mater of many of its engineers, Amino develops and manufactures the AmiNET line of set top boxes (STBs), and also developed the software stack that runs on them and enables decoding of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 IPTV signals.

Products
The AmiNET solution began its gestation several years ago when Ericsson commissioned the firm to write software for a planned STB. The Swedish company later asked Amino to design and build the hardware as well.

The current lineup includes six products, including an MPEG-2 HD model, an MPEG-4 unit, an IPTV PVR, and a product developed especially for the growing hospitality, institutional and enterprise market.

The company claims it was first with a single-chip decoder box. It claims it was first with deployments of high definition (HD) IPTV STBs and MPEG-4 set top boxes in the U.S. In 2003, the distinctive-looking AmiNET product with its eliptical shape won a Red Dot Award, a European industrial design honor. The AmiNET boxes are a third to a quarter the size of most competitors' products.

Amino also claims its products can work with more third-party software products than any other STB—more browsers, more conditional access systems (the encryption systems that prevent non-customers from decoding and viewing IPTV and satellite signals) and more middleware. This gives operators maximum flexibility when integrating a solution.

The list of middleware partners includes more than ten names, including major players such as Myrio and Kasenna. The Amino software can work with any one of nine conditional access systems.

The company recently added two more browser options to its portfolio by porting browsers from Opera Software ASA and the Mozilla Foundation (FireFox) to its STB stack. That brought the total to four: the product already worked with browsers from ANT Software Ltd. and Espial.

Competitors
Amino's principal competitors include Kreatel, Thomson, and Tilgin (formerly i3 micro technology). "I'd love to get into a bake-off with those guys because my set top box just performs better," says Rick Sailor, Amino's Atlanta-based vice president of sales for the Americas.

IPTV operators apparently agree. Amino has supplied STBs to major IPTV deployments in over 50 countries worldwide. Half its sales have come in the U.S. where it has sold product to between 125 and 150 operators, mostly telephone companies. Its largest deployment is SureWest with about 41,000 subscribers on a fiber-to-the-home network. Sailor guesstimates Amino's U.S. market share at between 40 and 50 percent.

Its global market share may not be much less. According to Sailor, estimates of the installed base of IPTV STBs worldwide range from 550,000 to 1.5 million. Amino shipped 10,000 units in 2003, 174,000 in 2004 and 315,000 last year, he says. "And this year we're expecting to double what we did last year."

A soft future
While the company has had its success to date with the integrated hardware-software products, it realizes the STB software is its most important asset going forward. "It's the software stack that does the important work in decoding the signal," Sailor points out. "Ours is very efficient and very good at taking that MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 signal and giving it to the TV so [the picture] doesn't jitter, there's no pixelizing, no dropped packets, and it does the joins and leaves accordingly. It's an intricate little piece of software."

As part of the restructuring to help cement its future, Amino recently spun off a separate division, IntAct, to market the software on its own to other STB manufacturers. The move is a recognition of the realities of the market, Sailor says.

"Sure, it's going to cannibalize set top box sales to some extent. We may lose a couple of customers that are buying our [software] and set top box now and will use the software on somebody else's box in future. But we look to the long term—to 2007 and 2009. The hardware is already being beaten up from a price standpoint. Eventually it becomes a commodity."

IntAct has begun negotiations with some potential software licensees but has made no sales yet, he says.

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