New Netgear Powerline AV 500 Solutions to Enable Multiple Streams of HD Video
Netgear is announcing Tuesday video streaming and networking products designed to improve HD video streaming throughout homes. Vivek Pathela, the vice president and general manager for home/consumer products, told Consumer Electronics Daily that buffering times of 20-30 seconds, video jitter, screen freezes and audio/video sync issues are limiting consumers’ enjoyment of streaming in the connected TV world. The new Powerline AV 500 products, due out this fall, are designed to deal with the problems, he said.
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Reliability and bandwidth are obstacles to a smooth video experience in the connected home, Pathela told us. “It’s not just bandwidth but how well bandwidth is sustained at high rates, so that the network doesn’t drop video packets,” he said. Blu-ray programming, for example, requires 30-35 Mbps of sustained bandwidth over a network streaming from a PC at one end of a house to a TV at the other, he said, but current 802.11n wireless networking technology can’t support that data rate at constant levels, he said. Interference from products including microwave ovens adds a hurdle to smooth streaming of wireless signals, he said.
Netgear’s Powerline AV 500 technology claims 500-Mbps data speeds, said to allow streaming multimedia, multiplayer gaming and multiple HD video streams. “You can get two or three HD videos, at 25-30 Mbps bitstreams each, continuously streaming to multiple TVs in the house” -- speeds that weren’t possible with Powerline 200, Pathela said. Powerline 200 was also plagued by power surges when a heavy-duty appliance such as a washing machine kicked in, Pathela said. Netgear has put more-robust technology in its Powerline AV 500 gear, he said. “The noise from other electrical appliances turning on doesn’t impact available bandwidth for streaming video as it would for 200 Mbps, because the available bandwidth of AV 500 is higher and more resilient to noise,” he said.
Netgear is targeting both powerline and wireless customers with the AV 500 solutions, Pathela said. Wireless users can benefit from using powerline for high-data transfers such as connected Blu-ray players and network-attached storage devices, because it will complement their other home networking technology, he said. Users who want to go wireless with laptops or Wi-Fi phones can use the powerline solution for video, he said. With a dual solution, he said, consumers can “offload powerline from wireless and get more total network bandwidth in the process.”
Current powerline users can update devices one at a time, Pathela said, because 500 AV is backward-compatible with 200 AV. “Anywhere in the house where you want high-speed 500 Mbps, you can plug in a device from the kit to a power outlet and to the source on the other end and get the highest speeds possible for streaming HD video,” he said. Older Powerline 200 video devices, such as Apple TV, can communicate at 200 Mbps and not suffer because of their lower resolution, he said. Powerline AV 500 devices are for the future, he said. “There’s going to be demand for even higher-quality video streams that require a lot more bandwidth,” he said, “and we're preparing home networks for that."
Netgear will ship two Powerline AV 500 adapter kits with a pair of AV 500 modules and two Ethernet cables ($159, $179) in November, the higher-end model bundling a filtered outlet for additional devices, the company said. Energy-saving features include automatic shut-off, which powers down devices when they're not in use. The company is also launching the NeoTV 550 Ultimate HD media player ($219) designed to allow users to play digital videos, photos, or music on TV whether media is stored locally, on the home network or on the Internet, the company said. The player is due in October.
The company is also working on an improved video streaming solution for 802.11n, Pathela said, that allows for multiple video streams and interference-free operation. He said the product will be available this year.