Bringing it all togeer: Optimizing value in the Connected Home

The connected home is becoming increasingly important to pay-TV service providers and presents them with some new challenges. They face competition from big consumer-electronics players and need to find the best way to use their own products to connect different devices and thereby own the home. To help its customers address these challenges, NAGRA has launched JoinIn, a reference architecture for the connected home which provides a blueprint to ensure all the different elements work together, seamlessly and effortlessly.

What is JoinIn? JoinIn is a reference or blueprint architecture for the connected home which helps service providers to deliver an innovative and seamless user experience to their subscribers across different devices.

What JoinIn does is define a homogenous set of innovative technologies, protocols, industry standards and best practices. This allows pay-TV operators to integrate different technology components to ensure that their premium content can be viewed and shared conveniently on a variety of devices.

What kind of features can JoinIn enable? A lot of exciting TV-viewing scenarios can be enabled by the JoinIn architecture: the whole-home PVR where recorded content is shared and streamed to TV sets around the home, live TV streaming from a multimedia home gateway to WiFi-enabled devices, the side-loading of content from PVRs to tablets these are just a few examples.

How does it work? By offering a blueprint (the reference architecture) and an integration cook book (a set of best practices), JoinIn guides service providers and their digital TV partners in creating the most efficient connected-home solutions. It can be used both for completely new deployments and for bringing together already deployed elements in the best way.

To make an analogy with the construction industry, JoinIn can be a guide to building a house from the ground up or a guide to extending and upgrading an existing home.

NAGRA has its own end-to-end pre-integrated solution for the connected home based on the JoinIn architecture. It implements the NAGRA HomEdge Gateway (powered by the OpenTV 5 middleware), NAGRA MediaAccess CAS and DRM as well as NAGRA MediaLive Multiscreen products.

Which industry standards and protocols are involved? JoinIn defines the integration of a multimedia home gateway with companion devices and other TV screens, so that both broadcast and cloud content can be delivered around the home. The standards and protocols used by JoinIn addresses content streaming and protection, user interfaces, cloud-based OTT delivery and service management.

The JoinIn architecture is based mainly on open industry standards such DLNA, uPnP as well as CAS/DRM technology along with HTML5 in client devices. For delivering video between devices, it relies on either native IP or adaptive bit-rate streaming.

What does JoinIn offer to pay-TV service providers? The most important thing that JoinIn does is to help pay-TV service providers get the most out of the connected home. It does this by offering them a blueprint reference architecture that is optimized, flexible and innovative so that they can deploy scalable solutions.

So JoinIn helps them to deliver their most important premium content securely to all devices within the home and offer a user experience that is seamless and consistent across all devices. That's good news for users who really crave a consistent user experience and it's good news for the operators, who can brand this user experience to reinforce their relevance and presence in the digital lives of their customers.

What's more, JoinIn is future-proof, because it offers a flexible and modular architecture that is based on best-of-breed technologies and standards. It also offers reduced time-to-market and integration costs because it is designed to stimulate an open-vendor ecosystem without any lock-in.

For vendors, JoinIn offers a stronger partnership relationship with NAGRA and more efficient integration with NAGRA products while defining clear integration points with other components.

Why is JoinIn needed? Leaving content sharing to vertical CE players like Apple, Google or Microsoft brings important risks. Pay-TV service providers clearly need to make the connected home a reality and a business success, and they need to keep control of the home and maximize reach. JoinIn addresses these needs and helps service providers ensure that their premium content can be viewed conveniently by their customers on all relevant devices tablets, smartphones, personal computers and TV sets.

Several NAGRA customers have been are working with us, asking about how best to provide operator-controlled security to the whole-home PVR and companion devices to address the requirements of content providers. JoinIn is the result of these efforts and is a proven reference architecture for integrating the service provider's in-home equipment with that of third-party CE vendors.

What is the competition and how does JoinIn compare? There are various products in the market from consumer-electronics manufacturers which allow users to stream OTT video to tablets, smartphones and PCs and also to send it to big-screen TV displays. Some products allow content stored in the home to be sent to tablets or smartphones, but only via vertically integrated apps.

By leveraging industry standards, JoinIn enables service providers to do all this and more providing better integration between broadcast and OTT-delivered content to ensure that live and on-demand TV can be streamed, recorded, shared, sent to and retrieved from all devices in the home, both those of the service provider as well as third-party consumer devices.

As a result, a subscriber can enjoy a fully integrated experience enabled by his service provider's implementation of JoinIn while using different

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