Today, Texas Instruments made a big deal (http://goo.gl/gUBvt) announcing they were the first to achieve certification for the Netflix HD Silicon Reference Implementation. Ignoring for a moment the importance of HD video on small screen devices including smartphones and tablets – this is good news for the Android marketplace as a whole. In February, I wrote about the fragmented Android marketplace for Android devices, including both the Boxee box and a number of Android-based tablet devices. (Boxee did manage to overcome those hurdles and release Netflix onto Boxee Box on Valentine’s day -- February 14, 2011.) The fact that TI and Netflix cooperated to develop a reference implementation implies that other vendors will soon follow. We hope to see Qualcomm in the mobile device space and Broadcom, Intel, Sigma, Zoran, Trident and others in the TV space.
Once they have cooperated (with Netflix as referee) on this silicon implementation establishing security and video decoding for an HD video platform could make conditional access (CA) and digital rights management (DRM) security implementations less fragmented – further enabling Android’s role in the digital home and setting the stage for video delivery to Android devices.
