So the same thing will happen to everyone that has entered this cloud based OTT multiscreen software race, which happened to IPTV middleware – they will all be bought and sold and some will fall by the wayside. Cisco certainly needed a purchase, but it went out and bought the wrong company in NDS, it should have bought TiVo.

Every set top company is on the way to becoming a software house and cannot avoid the need to acquire this type of technology, and should stop building hardware. Motorola has all the wrong technologies, suitable only for classic multitasking IPTV, and yet it has no basis for buying a company. Google of course might approach one of these many OTT companies, but why own it AND Motorola Home, that’s not a good plan.

Everyone that has a co-ordinated technology for cloud video search and amalgamation of EPG data, and cloud and device strategy for recommendations, will become valuable. If a company like Technicolor doesn’t have the software in-house (and we don’t think it has), it can take its pick of Netgem or Wyplay or both without leaving its native country.

But Ericsson continues to be the fly in the ointment for us. It has software developments along all of these directions, but really needs the know-how of someone who has done this all before – and the smart move would be to buy TiVo, in order to take the fight to Cisco.