San Diego-based Solekai Systems is bringing its porting and integration expertise to Comcast’s Reference Design Kit after signing the RDK license.
The base layer of the RDK stack is comprised of the system-on-a-chip companies, such as Broadcom and Entropic, which do the basic porting to make sure the RDK works on their platforms. The end result is a shortened development cycler for set-top boxes.
Solekai, an engineering services company specializing in STB and digital video solutions, will support the implementation of the RDK in set-top development, multi-screen integration and bit stream testing solutions.
“We’re very excited to engage in support of the RDK in order to reduce time to market for our current and future clients in the digital video space,” Tim McConnell, Solekai’s executive vice president of engineering, said.
Also on the integration front, itaas announced earlier this year that it had signed the RDK license. Other vendors include Motorola Mobility, Entropic, Evolution Digital, Cisco, Broadcom, Entropic and S3 Group. Cable operators that are part of the RDK include, in addition to Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications and Liberty Global.
This week, Time Warner Cable and Comcast are hosting the RDK Developers Community Conference tomorrow and Wednesday at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York City.
The conference is a private affair and by invitation only. Last week, Espial jumped the gun by issuing a press release that said its was participating in the conference, but a Comcast spokeswoman said via email that the company didn’t have permission to do so.
Comcast came up with the RDK to cut down the development cycle of new set-top boxes from two years to one year, or even under one year. The Comcast RDK was developed internally by Comcast using open-source components and by working with various vendors. The RDK is a community-based project that allows developers, vendors and cable operators to use a defined stack of software on one layer in order to provision set-top boxes and gateways with HTML5 and IP capabilities.
The RDK allows all of the interested parties to develop once and then scale across multiple environments – in the CableCard/QAM/MEPG-2 world of today, as well as in the IP environment of tomorrow.
