HDBaseT Standard Has Fans, But Faces Tough Road to Mainstream

HDBaseT, the single-wire connectivity standard that supplements the functionality of HDMI with data, control and power, faces a challenging road moving from niche applications to the mainstream market, said industry observers polled by Consumer Electronics Daily on the platform’s one-year anniversary. Developed by Israel-based Valens Semiconductor, HDBaseT sends protected uncompressed audio and video signals, control codes, data and power up to 328 feet over a low-cost Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable. That makes it a blessing for the custom electronics market, which uses long cable runs to carry high-quality audio and video signals, its backers said. But whether HDBaseT can expand beyond niche applications for large-scale commercial and luxury home installation is a question mark roughly a year after the initial spec was released, observers said.

The promise of HDBaseT is all the more appealing in light of a more stringent Energy Star proposal by the EPA that would limit the maximum power draw of a TV to 85 watts (CED June 6 p1), observers said. The Energy Star draft version 6.0 standard, proposed in early June, is due to take effect in spring 2012. HDBaseT’s ability to power a TV at less than 100 watts could be further incentive for TV makers to design in the chipset which terminates with a standard RJ-45 connector, they said. In theory, HDBaseT is the consumer’s answer to the wiring nightmare produced by today’s home entertainment systems, they said. In fact, HDBaseT faces numerous hurdles in becoming a mainstream standard, they said.

"The issue for HDBaseT comes down to economics and market competition,” Brian O'Rourke, research director of digital entertainment for In-Stat, told Consumer Electronics Daily. He cited adoption of HDBaseT technology by custom and commercial control companies Crestron and AMX, and custom extender suppliers Gefen and Atlona, but says broader adoption faces hurdles. “Their challenge in expanding adoption is to create economies of scale that will make their solution more affordable,” O'Rourke said, “and that won’t happen in the custom home space.” In addition, he said, HDBaseT isn’t the only multi-function networking solution hoping to gain traction. It faces competition from coax-based solutions, power line, and Wi-Fi, including next-gen Wi-Fi standards such as 802.11ac and 802.11ad, he said. In-Stat hasn’t forecast HDBaseT adoption, he said, “but if I were to do so, it would not be aggressive."

Valens is currently the sole semiconductor supplier for the technology, although it’s an open specification available to third-party suppliers. Dana Zelitzki, business development representative for the privately held Valens, and spokeswoman for the HDBaseT Alliance, told us: “We very much encourage other chip vendors to join and we are in discussions with some.” She said she expects other chip vendors to join the alliance “very soon, within six months."

The next project for the alliance is a certification program that’s now being developed. Zelitzki wouldn’t expand on the program other than to say it means vendors will be able to certify that their products are HDBaseT version 1.0 in product marketing. The certification program will be finalized over the next couple of months, she said.

Version 2.0 HDBaseT is in the works and adds networking to expand HDBaseT beyond point-to-point connectivity to include routers that will serve as central connection points, or bridges, to all HDBaseT products in the home, Zelitzki said. The router, which would reside in a basement or equipment closet, would connect to the displays in a home, and each would have access to any source on the network: a Blu-ray player, game console, set-top box or computer, she said. The solution “replaces multiple devices you have to have in each room,” she said, offering “a complete solution” that can transmit data at up to 8 gigabits per second.

In addition to Valens, founding members of the HDBaseT Alliance include Sony Pictures Entertainment, Samsung and LG. Underscoring the sensitivity of manufacturer support for a new solution that’s been offered by some as an alternative to HDMI, LG and Samsung did not respond to repeated requests for interviews about HDBaseT for this story and, specifically, for product plans incorporating HDBaseT into TVs. Sony Electronics spokesman Mack Araki told us that the hardware side of Sony, while not part of the Alliance, is being briefed on developments by its sister company Sony Pictures.

Sony Pictures’ Motives

Sony Pictures’ involvement with HDBaseT ultimately comes down to “selling more content,” said Mitch Singer, chief technology officer, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. For a content provider, “the more home theater we sell, the more Blu-ray discs we're going to sell,” he said. Consumers are buying Blu-ray players as part of a home theater system “that has to pass 5.1 lossless audio, 50 gigs of data and 20 megabits per second so you need HDMI cables to connect the uncompressed digital outputs to your TV,” Singer said. He said the alliance is “fairly certain our products will get UL-approval for 100 watts over 100 meters in length” to complete the promise of uncompressed audio and video, data, control for game players and power over a single cable. “We're looking at increasing the amount of power over Cat 5e and Cat 6,” he said. “If we can make it really easy for a consumer using this new technology to put in home theaters, then we'll sell more content,” Singer said.

The scenario of delivering power from a Blu-ray player to a TV, “means the TV can be hung on any wall in your house without the need for an electrical outlet,” Singer said. That eliminates the need for having an electrician involved in hanging a flat-panel TV, he said. It also allows for less-expensive TVs “because you don’t need a power block on the TV anymore,” he said. Instead, TV makers would incorporate HDBaseT chipsets and an RJ-45 connector on the back panel. “You don’t need expensive HDMI cables now” he said, “because we can deliver HDMI over Cat 6 with a regular field-terminable Ethernet jack. You wouldn’t even need to put in HDMI connectors,” he said. From a TV maker side, displays could be built “for much lower cost” because of the savings on the power supply and HDMI connectors, he said.

Atlona Technologies is selling its HDBaseT-based matrix video switchers/extender as a “cable replacement technology,” Chris Bundy, director of marketing, told us. One of the most expensive parts of putting together a multi-room AV system is “moving all that data and signal around,” he said. Cat5e, at roughly six cents per foot with HDBaseT, replaces HDMI cables --typically $10 per foot in longer runs -- cables for bidirectional infrared control plus RS-232 at 60 cents to $1 per foot and audio over optical cable at another 30 cents a foot, Bundy said. At more than $10-per-foot savings, at 300-foot runs in a custom installation, “you're talking thousands of dollars,” he said, a cost that’s typically difficult to justify to end users. “And that’s just the cable run,” he said. Converters required to combine the various signals from multiple devices at the same data rate could add “a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars to a project,” he said. Atlona’s AT-HD4-V110SR HDMI extender kit retails for $499.

Although a Valens HDBaseT chipset costs Atlona about $28 versus $3 for a Silicon Image HDMI chip, Bundy expects that cost to drop to $10 by Q2 2012. Suppliers save money on the connectors since an HDMI port costs manufacturers $1.25 each compared with a Cat5 connection at 10-30 cents a pop, he said. As a member of the HDMI Consortium, too, Bundy admits a company like Atlona is navigating “tough waters” in its enthusiasm for HDBaseT “because we have a relationship with the HDMI consortium as well. I think HDMI has something to worry about,” he said.

The HDMI consortium sees it differently. Steve Venuti, president of HDMI Licensing, told us HDBaseT “really has no chance to replace HDMI.” HDBT has “layered stuff on top” of delivering signal and is trying to make that a standard of delivering HDMI, he said. “Establishing a standard is more than saying, ‘we're the death of HDMI, which doesn’t do anything for the industry,'” Venuti said: “Putting a different connector on the back of a product requires a lot of time, a lot of work and a lot of coordination among all the implementers. It’s easier said than done."

Venuti conceded that HDBaseT solves the issue of long runs in “niche applications,” as HDMI maxes out at a distance of 30 feet or less. But HDMI covers 95 percent of AV connector needs, he said. In response to whether HDMI Licensing would address the distance issue down the road, Venuti said “maybe it’s something we need to look at."

Zelitzki of HDBaseT told us the Alliance and Valens expect TVs with Ethernet connectors for HDBaseT to be in the market by year end or early 2012, but Venuti doesn’t see that happening. Citing extender products from companies including Atlona and Gefen, he said they may succeed adding features and functionality over Cat5 that are important to the custom installer community, “but it will always end up plugging into the HDMI connector.” Despite the presence of LG and Samsung as founding companies of the HDBaseT Alliance, Venuti said “I just don’t see any major manufacturers of CE components having any inclination to put another connector on the back.” He added that both companies “are aligned with every interface out there,” including HDMI, DIIVA and DisplayPort. “They essentially put their bet on every horse in the race, but that doesn’t mean they're going to put all effort in being the first to market with any of these technologies,” Venuti said. LG and Samsung didn’t respond to our requests for comment.

Put on the defensive since the launch of the HDBaseT spec last June when headlines such as “HDMI is dead” followed the introduction of HDBaseT, Venuti told us, “The HDBaseT group has done a pretty good job of creating fear and confusion in the U.S. market, but when I go to Asia, where 70 percent of our licensees are, and all the design and manufacturing are going on for the CE world, people ask about DiiVA a little bit, and have been asking about DisplayPort, but not one person ever even heard of HDBaseT,” he said. “They don’t have any mindshare among the major manufacturers designing products in Asia."

That may not matter, according to Bundy of Atlona, who said there are only a “handful” of pick-and-place machines in the world that can add an HDMI port to equipment, and they're centered in the Shenzhen region of China and in Taiwan. “But you take that port and make it a Cat5 port, and you have that same product made in the U.S., Mexico or any other WTO-compliant country for the same price as I can do it in Taiwan, and I have access across multiple markets,” he said.

Cost Savings in Man-Hours

For Crestron and AMX, whose control systems deliver audio, video and data to large homes and commercial facilities, HDBaseT provides a solution they can’t get elsewhere. Justin Kennington, product line manager for Digital Media products at Crestron, said for the two years prior to the debut of HDBaseT, Crestron had to cobble together its own cabling systems for its Digital Media AV distribution system using Cat 5, high-performance twisted pair and four-conductor control wire. “Now integrators don’t need our special cable and don’t need to make three terminations on each end,” he said. Although the cable and connectors are cheaper than in a traditional HDMI installation, the real cost savings comes in man-hours, he said. On a large-scale project, time spent on wiring with HDBaseT is “the difference is between three weeks and four days,” he said. Crestron has sold “millions of dollars” worth of HDBaseT products in the past year in residential, commercial and government installations, Kennington said.

HDBaseT allows Crestron to put a receiver at the end of the signal line that converts the HDBaseT signal to HDMI, USB, Ethernet and control signals, including a display. Instead of being limited to 30 or 50-foot HDMI runs, “I can go the full 100 meters afforded by HDBaseT,” Kennington said. He can also offer Crestron’s HDBaseT product as a retrofit solution to a building or home with a Cat5e or higher infrastructure and “now they can have full digital audio/video distribution,” he said. The company is going back to clients with older analog video systems and offering them the option to upgrade to digital video using Cat 5 wiring that’s already in walls.

Crestron has worked closely with Valens on HDBaseT and Kennington said Valens wants to build on the fundamental technology with new features that make it easy to integrate into existing products. “They have a big job ahead of them to convince the Samsungs and the Sonys of the world to get on board,” he said. “When you're selling 10 million of anything per year, any cost you add has to be justified.” The goals now for the HDBaseT Alliance, of which Crestron is a member, is to make HDBaseT easy and inexpensive to implement “so the guy selling 10 million units a year can say, ‘yes, clearly this belongs in my product.'"

Crestron competitor AMX had begun working on its own HDMI extension solution in 2009 when it met with Valens at Infocomm and first heard about HDBaseT. “It sounded too good to be true,” and Paul Hand, product manager at AMX, was skeptical that Valens could pull it off. “They were pushing the boundaries of what anybody was able to do on standard Category cable,” he said. “They're doing a 10.2-gibabit throughput on standard cable, and that’s a massive amount,” he said. AMX abandoned its solution, which would only have delivered up to 30 feet of signal using two Cat 5 or Cat 6 cables, Hand said, in favor of the Valens solution that worked up to 300 feet without the need for a repeater. “It was a tough decision because we were already well along the design path,” he said, “but we restarted the project with the single-Cat HDBaseT solution and it made a world of difference in the purity of the digital signal all the way through the system."

AMX, like Crestron, doesn’t use the power component of the technology now, but Hand sees that as a tremendous benefit down the road. Valens “firmly believes it’s a realistic solution” to have low-power displays run over HDBaseT, according to Hand, who calls it an “intriguing solution.” Consumer interest in flat-panel TV is driven as much by the living environment as anything else, and minimal wiring fits into the sleek look consumers seek, he said. With HDBaseT fully implemented, “I no longer have to have a Blu-ray player in every room,” Hand said. “I can have an equipment room with a couple of Blu-ray players, a couple of satellite receivers or cable boxes and I can push that content to each display over one wire.” Then the audio/video technology becomes “unobtrusive in an environment,” he said. While HDMI, by contrast, is “cool technology,” it’s “distance-limited,” Hand said. “You have to do a lot of planning to make sure our equipment can be located in relatively close proximity to those large displays."

Whether HDBaseT might supplant HDMI down the road is something Hand is watching with interest. Any device with an HDMI output could be replaced by an HDBaseT connector, theoretically, he said, “and there’s an argument for that.” But he cited the “build-up period to critical mass” where companies wait for each other to go first before committing to new technology. A Blu-ray player isn’t going to have HDBaseT on board if there’s not a display from that company to complete the loop, he said. Regarding display companies like HDBaseT founding members Samsung and LG and their likelihood of introducing TVs with HDBaseT chipsets, Hand said, “I would expect down the road, maybe sooner than later, that they would start doing that. At least you would think so,” he added. “We're watching just like everybody else."

Control4 has an eye on HDBaseT, according to co-founder Eric Smith, but has no current plans to deploy the technology in its control system. “We currently do not plan to make any HDBaseT products, but we find the technology very interesting and would like to see HDBaseT replace standard HDMI cables,” Smith told us. Control4 products currently work with “almost all” of the HDMI switches and technologies on the market, “including those that use HDBaseT,” but the company doesn’t make any itself, Smith said. In the future, “if TVs and source devices had HDBaseT on them, we might consider changing our devices to also use HDBaseT because of the benefits of that technology,” he said, noting HDBaseT’s “ability to use existing Cat 5 cable, ability to co-exist with Ethernet on the same Cat 5 and ability to provide power to some devices."

On the installer side, CEDIA is taking a cautious, but intrigued stance on HDBaseT, said Dave Pedigo, senior director of technology. “It seems like it’s a promising technology,” Pedigo said, noting that a working demo of a 75-foot uncompressed AV run in the technology pavilion at the CEDIA Expo in Atlanta last year “looked fantastic.” He said the technology appears to have enough bandwidth to handle a high-quality 3D image. Pedigo hasn’t seen HDBaseT at work in the field so he couldn’t assess conditions that might cause glitches. “You have to be very careful” before putting new connection technology in the home,” he said, “but it’s a very interesting development to see power and signal together over one cable.”

Aside from the applications in residential and commercial installations, other uses could emerge if HDBaseT takes off, which would help bring down costs of the emerging technology, noted Sony’s Singer. Singer sees a retail angle where the transport technology could dovetail with another of Singer’s projects, the Ultraviolet digital locker system. Studios pay a lot to have products displayed on endcaps and at checkout, Singer said. HDBaseT could enable retailers to “put a touchscreen display at any checkout where the server is connected 100 meters away,” and consumers would be able to select content from the touchscreen “that goes right into their digital locker,” he said. The display could go anywhere in the store “because I don’t need power” since it’s delivered over the Cat 5 cable, Singer said. “This technology might be able to lower the cost of digital signage in a way that would make it much more economically feasible to do something like this,” he said.