We had a chance to chat with Minerva Networks about motion control and its place in the set top box.

According to Minerva, the only thing standing in the way of a great, interactive, motion-enabled user experience over the cable TV networks is an installed base of tens of millions of boxes that would have to be tossed and replaced.

Minerva believes that there is not a business model around that supports that kind of revolutionary change.

“There is a massive legacy of installed boxes that would have to be purged and replaced,” says Matt Cuson, vice president of marketing at Minerva Networks in Santa Clara, CA. He does not see anything of the sort happening soon – either with satellite TV or cable TV.

“You are dealing with a conservative, slow moving industry that will be making the decisions,” he points out. This is not to say that either Cuson or the cable operators are in any way opposed to motion applications. It is simply that the weight of that installed base is pressing down on any such change.

Minerva Networks writes application software that runs on set-top boxes. They would like nothing better than an assignment to enable a premium motion experience for cable operators like Cox or Time-Warner.

“In the TV world, it will take a long time,” Cuson expects. “You are dealing with inertia and history. You have millions of set top boxes that don’t have the CPU, power or memory to run this kind of application.”

Since the various cable network operators have fragmented territories, there is the challenge of service access.

“A device like a Wii is a consumer product that you can go out and buy,” Cuson points out. When it is not being used, the Wii can be set aside. It tends to be an individual experience, whereas the family’s TV sets are a community experience and those set top boxes run all day and night.

“One thing our operators can not afford to do is to chase after a user who can not change,” Cuson says. There is a huge market of game players that is well understood. But it is separate from the traditional cable TV customer who wants news, sports and late-night movie channels.

Motion enabling controllers for cable TV will require more bandwidth. Will that interfere with other set top boxes in a household? Other boxes that are served out of a head end?

What Cuson terms “connectiveness” is a problem. While games that use motion are common in the single-box consumer world, there is little history of that in the television world. “You can’t be too brave, too brazen,” he says. “It will eventually happen. But you need to get the market educated first.”

There are practical considerations, too. People with remotes are fumbling with buttons that they really can not see in the dark. That hardly meets the needs of a fast-moving, interactive game.

What happens to a gamer with a motion-enabled device in hand when they reach over to adjust a pillow or to turn a page on the newspaper? What is the effect of a complex set of moves on others looking at TV in the same house?

“If we were to get really active (with a motion-enabled box), we would have to partner with another company to support our applications,” Cuson says. Minerva does not have its own accelerometer or other hardware. “However, if someone else’s device had something in it, we’d be able to get it to talk,” he says.

Operators are a long time from running the kinds of services that an accelerometer-enabled handset or wearable would enable. In fact, today’s networks have limitations on what they actually can run…not technologically, but from other aspects.

“Whatever happens, it can not interfere with the video experience,” Cuson says. “As long as devices like the Wii are played separately on the TV, everything is okay. But once you bring it into the TV space, a different set of rules apply.

“The problem is setting it up and monetizing the service without messing up the network,” Cuson continues. A ‘good enough’ service won’t be good enough. Users will have the expectation of a premium experience. There are reliability and quality issues. And, at the bottom is the bottom line: if the service providers can not provide a premium experience at a premium price, why bother?

The key is a commonality of services and a commonality of consumer expectations.

Standards bodies, like the redoubtable CableLabs, are working on standards. Their OCAP (OpenCable Platform) is a step in the right direction. The OCAP specification defines a middleware software layer enabling interactive television service and application developers to “write” products once and see them run successfully on any cable television system in North America, independent of set-top or television receiver hardware or operating system software, according to CableLabs. This interoperability enables manufacturers and retail distributors to build and to sell digital devices capable of supporting all cable services now delivered to devices that may currently be leased to consumers.

But even that standard has burdens to carry. Cuson says it looks good on paper but is not really practical when cable operators deploy.

“It sounds compelling. It is well-intentioned, but it will take longer than anyone wants,” Cuson says. “Compatibility is not interchangeable,” he explains. “You have to live with any decision you make for an extremely long time. Every architecture is different.”

The philosophy in the industry today seems to be to stick to what the industry does best – push a video experience down the pipes to the user. There is no doubt that every cable TV executive, set top box manufacturer and software developer is aware of the possible benefits of providing a motion-enabled over the cable network. But until someone comes up with a way to handle the practical hurdles in today’s market, motion-enabled cable is apt to be a separate world from the video-driven cable experience.

From our perspective, everything that Matt discusses makes perfect sense — but some unrelated trends in the cable market may help. There are two trends that may create a shorter turnaround on set top boxes than expected:  first, the move by some content providers (for example, HBO) to provide their feeds to the MSOs in MPEG-4 AVC form, a codec not supported by most of today’s cable set tops (though many satellite and IPTV set tops support the codec), so there’s definitely volume in the hardware world to support a switch by cable without breaking new ground in terms of silicon; second, the potential move to switched digital video as a means of keeping up with the IPTV and satelllite “joneses” in terms of HDTV channel capacity. Either of these likely moves may move up the set top box upgrade cycle and offer an entree for more powerful boxes that could support motion control.  And if they don’t happen, well that provides an even bigger market gap for IPTV and satellite to innovate and gain market share over cable by offering their own motion-controlled TV offerings.