Cabot targets European expansion

Following a second successive year of record growth, UK digital TV software company Cabot Communications has revealed its strategy to conquer the European digital TV market.

Following a second successive year of record growth, UK digital TV software company Cabot Communications has revealed its strategy to conquer the European digital TV market.

The company already dominates the UK digital terrestrial TV (DTT) software market, with over 60% of all free-to-air digital set top boxes running on its DTV middleware.

Cabot plans to match this success with a 20% share in the European market by 2010.

The rapid expansion of the European digital TV market fuelled impressive growth for Cabot in FY 2004-05, with annual turnover increasing by 139%, to GBP 4 million, with profits of GBP 450,000.

This growth was driven by demand for its pan-European digital TV stack, Aurora, which meets the unique transmission requirements of every European DTT network, significantly reducing software development costs and speeding up product launches for set top box and digital TV manufacturers.

In the last six months, Cabot has secured a number of contracts with leading manufacturers, including JVC, and is now active in over 10 countries, including France, Germany, Sweden and Finland.

In order to meet future demand from manufacturers, Cabot increased its staff in FY 2004-05, from 31 to over 65 people.

The company invested in a new customer service centre in Urla, Turkey, and increased its core development team by five senior engineers.

According to Darren Standing, Business Development Manager, of Cabot Communications, the further growth in Europe will be fuelled by demand from manufacturers to speed up the development of new digital TV devices: "In order to realise greater profit margins manufacturers are diversifying their product ranges to include new devices such as PVRs, integrated digital TVs and IPTV boxes".

"However, in such a competitive and price-driven market few manufacturers can afford to invest time and money in developing their own middleware".

"By using Aurora, manufacturers can concentrate their efforts on differentiating features such as the design or user interface and ensure products are available ahead of the competition".

Cabot says that strategic partnerships will play a key role in the company's expansion plans.

It has already forged a close relationship with Alticast, allowing Cabot to integrate Alticast's Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) software into Aurora, ensuring the stack can support MHP interactivity for European digital TV as well as MHEG-5 interactivity for the UK.

According to Standing, reseller agreements with semiconductor companies will be essential if Cabot is to maintain a market leading position across Europe: "Manufacturers increasingly expect their hardware platform to come pre-integrated with digital TV software, so the semiconductor companies need to have a solution".

"The fact that we have already established partnerships with many of the major semiconductor manufacturers gives Cabot an obvious advantage in the digital TV industry".

In FY 2004-05, Cabot secured a number of agreements with resellers, including Zoran, to offer manufacturers a fully integrated DVB-T reference platform to bring new set top boxes and digital TVs to market quickly.

Other partners include ST Microelectronics, Fujitsu, IBM, NEC and Micronas.

Cabot has been active in interactive content creation, delivery and services for over ten years.

Its TV stack is currently deployed in over three million digital receivers across Europe.

The company was one of the pioneering contributors to the MHEG-5 UK interactive standard and is an active participant in a number of digital TV forums, including DTG, DVN and DigiTAG.

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