Quote:
Originally Posted by Stuart C
I never said the Liberate back end stuff was wonderful. I merely pointed out that it would cost NTL an awful lot of money to replace. Unless you don't consider half a billion pounds (taking my £50,000,000 estimate and adding an extra zero as spiderplant said) to be a lot of money.
---------- Post added at 00:53 ---------- Previous post was at 00:48 ----------
One final thing I have to say on this subject. IF NTL should decide to replace Liberate (which, as it is at the core of their DTV system, means they would have to effectively build a new DTV system), I doubt they would come to forums such as this. They would probably consult experts in the field. While I will concede that it is possible that we do have such experts amongst our membership, we have no proof that any member here is.
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im rather bored of the humdrum threads so i thought id bump this thread and see if anyone wants to give their thoughts/ideas.
while you make some good points as usual stuart, i do think the maths are rather high, its fact that NTL and C&W before them just seem to take whatever the wholesellers are dishing out at the time rather than commission a box, (rather like ordinary people going down the local supermarket and seeing whats available cheap today) and so are paying lowest price for lowest spec tech currently.
remember they were commited to the so called open platform but never got around to opening the thing up to 3rd partys, and that as everyone knows by now, i think thats hit the profit margins and inovation for the UK cable markets in a very big way.
as for the 'They would probably consult experts in the field', well look were we are today, and were we should have been by now, so their so called experts track record isnt very inovative or even profitable to date(except for the experts bank ballance etc)infact barely getting by comes to mind.
if infact they had bothered to come to this and other places to see what the techy people/early adaptors and even the ordinary users were saying and asking for, then perhaps NTL:tw would today be in far better shape finantially to the creditors, and then perhaps be able to find some new capital investment from the shareholders and VC's.
if NTL:tw wernt in such a finantial mess then they wouldnt need to find all this capital outlay all in one go as then they would only pay (or rather the SH/CR/VC's would pay) for shipped product as and when it was delivered so thats far easyer to finance long term or you wouldnt be seeing the Samsung stb's replacing the old pace boxs now would you?.
on the matter of 'replace Liberate', they wouldnt need to as such, just dump the old, and switch to the new, as all the new stuff would need to do in the interim, is know how to talk liberate network codes and use that until any new system was fully tested and working, (thats the open platform tcp:ip/udp/html/etc for you,) its commonly known as a software wrapper and every programmer and tech people know about it.
ragarding that basic developers board ,perhaps the readers would look at the pdf to see just were the genesi EFIKA board and its like are intended to be used, a vast area of profit, far bigger than desktops and growing fast
http://www.freescale.com/files/ftf_2...2006_AA117.pdf