Entone is taking the covers off its new Hydra IP video gateway, which the company says will help telcos realize lower installation costs. The company is introducing the product at the TelcoTV show in Orlando.
For homes with multiple TVs, users need a number of set-top boxes, requiring technicians to wire homes for Ethernet, which typically costs about $500 just for installation, explains Entone CEO Steve McKay. But Hydra, which will sell for “well below $150 per TV,” is a single device that sits at the primary TV and uses the in-home coax to distribute video to up to six TVs in the home – eliminating the cost and unsightliness of stringing Ethernet along homeowners’ floorboards, McKay says.
Hydra is a telco-only video product and is expected to be generally available next month.
At the same time new products and technology like Entone’s Hydra are bringing down the costs of telco TV installation, equipment costs also are lowering, says McKay. For example, he says Entone’s video servers are much less expensive than traditional video servers, which cost several hundred thousand dollars upfront.
While the traditional video servers are based on proprietary hardware, Entone’s servers are based on HP and IBM server hardware, making them far more affordable and easier to support. That means that while a traditional SeaChange-type server costs about $150 per stream, the Entone server software running on hardware from HP or IBM is closer to $50 or $60 per stream. And HP and IBM have local support centers throughout the county, McKay adds. And, the cost of set-top boxes has come down from around $500 to around $100, depending upon the features, in the past year or so.
Entone was started by a group of people who previously worked at Cable & Wireless Hong Kong to launch the world’s first video-on-demand telco network back in 1995. That C&W network now serves 350,000 subscribers, according to McKay.
Entone’s products include video-on-demand servers, asset management systems, set-top boxes and IP video gateways.
