From Video Processing to Media Processing?

By Calvin Hsieh – Research Director, DisplaySearch

Recently a new kind of media processing box became available China called “Little Blu-ray” that can bring HD movies to the TV. While TV sets traditionally have built-in tuners to receive broadcasting signals, the trend nowadays is to enable more powerful decoding and formats through USB 2.0 ports-but this raises the BOM cost accordingly. The BOM cost of this box could be approximately $30 but its retail price is $100 in China, so quite profitable. Instead of a built-in DVD loader, it has a media processor supporting many formats including JPG, MP3, RMVB, H.264 and so on.

Little Blu-ray is a set-top box that can play media (especially HD movies) ripped from original Blu-ray DVDs. Of course, this is illegal. Another illegal business model is for the user to bring a HDD or flash drive to copy ripped HD movies from some secret vendors. In the past, users had to pay $7-8 to purchase a pirated DVD. But now it’s just $4 to copy via a HDD or flash without any disc. Then the user directly plays back the HD movies via the Little Blu-ray on the TV set. There is another box called a downloader that is used to BT (bit torrent) movies online then play back onto TVs; again, it involves pirated content and is illegal.

Compared to Apple TV or Netflix’s hardware, which offer online movie rentals, Little Blu-ray retrieves media via offline modes such as USB 2.0 or even SATA. In the future, its specifications can be varied for segments. For example, it can be a simple box with a media processor, or additional built-in flash/HDD, or even DVD loader. Video processing for picture quality is a critical issue for all TVs, but we have seen a trend of media processing to retrieve more content from any possible sources coming to your TV sets.

With many households having purchased high resolution flat panel TVs, it seems reasonable to offer them an affordable solution for content convergence, rather than expecting them to buy a new expensive internet-capable TV to check widget channels or download movie trailers. After all, TVs are big investments, and unlike mobile phones, have a longer time before replacement.