It’s Been an Eventful Year ! – 2020 Retrospective
Published on Tuesday, 15 December 2020 12:30
It’s been somewhat of an up and down year for all of us, but we have still managed to achieve many things which we are proud of. Back in January we were excited and looking for to the year ahead, with our focus being on all things RDK. We were busy working with DTVkit to integrate their DVB stack into the RDK software platform and planning to demonstrate it at the RDK summit in Philadelphia, and the SES Industries days. We were also working on our new CI+ 2.0 Host stack with a view to starting the first customer design-in projects, as well are updating our MHEG engine for Android.
However it wasn’t long until Covid reared its head and our planning went out the window. However, we were lucky, we adjusted, and manged to carry on. Most of the team moved to home working, we met customers via zoom (other video conferencing applications are also available 🙂 ), and trade shows such as IBC became virtual (easier on the feet, but the after show parties were not as fun). Things did slow down a bit, but it was the same for everyone across the industry, and eventually they started to pick up again.
So, despite the uncertainty and some things taking longer than planned, we still managed to achieve what we set out to do at the beginning of the year. We helped DTVkit integrate their DVB stack into the RDK architecture and get it accepted by RDK. We started our first customer CI+ 2.0 host stack design-ins. We have our MHEG engine running as an Android application, although there’s still some bells and whistles to finish off on that one.
What was more pleasing is that we also managed to develop our first RDK lightning based UI. We were part of a consortium helping HbbTV to deliver the test materials for the new Targeted Advertising specification. We worked with DTVkit to provide an update to its DVB stack to also support multicast IPTV, and will soon add closed caption support into the mix. And, we started to investigate moving DTVkit’s DVB stack to the new Android 11 TunerHAL API to make it truly hardware independent. That one is still a work in progress though and something we hope to complete in the New Year.
Looking forward to 2021, it is still going to be a while before everything is back to normal, whatever that may be, but we have several exciting projects lined up. The themes are going to be similar to this year and we’ll be working on our first customer RDK deployments, further customer roll outs for CI+ 2.0, and completing the move to Android 11 and TunerHAL. On top of that we have few other things in the offing, but news on those will have to wait. So we are optimistic about 2021, and we look forward to working with our customers and partners in the New Year.
After what has been a turbulent year for all of us, all that remains is for all of us at Ocean Blue Software to wish everyone a “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”.