As TV gets more ambitious, set-top boxes add muscle

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San Francisco: The lowly set-top box, that unassuming plastic block that connects your television to your cable company, is about to become much, much more versatile.

With cable facing competition from telephone companies, PC makers and others, set-top boxes are being redesigned to unlock a host of new services, making them more like home computers than simple conduits for reruns of “Gilligan’s Island.”

At the cable industry’s annual trade show here recently, just about every major cable company and set-top box maker showed off devices that can record television shows, pause them, skip through commercials, and let any cable-connected television in the house replay them at any time.

But that’s just the beginning of what tomorrow’s cable and satellite set-top boxes will be able to do.

Motorola Inc., the biggest maker of set-top boxes, showed off prototype devices designed to let customers scan TV programming with their cell phones or office computers, set their DVRs, and monitor their homes via wirelessly connected cameras and sensors.

The new boxes and a related technology Motorola calls “Liquid Media” rely in part on processors made by Austin, Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor Inc., which was recently spun off from Motorola.

“For us, it’s not just a set-top box,” said Motorola spokesman Paul Alfieri. “This is a powerful broadband pipe into your home. We want to figure out how (consumers) can get the most out of it.”

Scientific-Atlanta Inc., the No. 2 set-top box manufacturer, planning to release this year boxes that let users write TV programs to blank DVDs. The Atlanta-based company, like others in the business, also is developing boxes that can wirelessly connect to home computers to easily “stream” digital photographs or music files to a TV set.

Digeo Inc., a set-top box software company backed primarily by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, is introducing technology that lets users store and access pictures, home movies and music right on their cable or satellite box.

Users of Digeo’s Moxi technology also can screen phone calls using a caller ID feature on their TV set or play built-in video games with their remote controls. Samsung Electronics Co. recently announced it was teaming up with Digeo to begin marketing high-tech boxes to cable companies this fall.

“The set-top box, I think, really becomes the focal point for a lot of your media, gaming and other experiences,” Allen said at a news conference here.

What’s driving the move toward high-tech set-top boxes?