Yesterday, the official 2020 RDK Euro Summit kicked off, in a slightly more different way than usual, as a virtual conference. Nevertheless, exciting updates were unveiled from leading telecom corporations- Comcast, SKY, Deutsche Telekom and Liberty Global- revolutionising the way RDK will be integrated into the near future via next-generation software platform RDK 4.
How did we get here?
With such exciting transformations, it is impressive to see how far RDK, video, and broadband technology have come, from the introduction of RDK-V to RDK-B, the software stack has uniformed accessible and transparent deployments that have progressed developments at all layers of software releases.
As the Telecommunications industry has accelerated in a fast-paced environment where STB’s are continuously evolving and developing from varying vendors to hold multiple applications and platforms in alignment with customer viewership experience. For this, the standardised platform of RDK has produced velocity in device, software, and application development, where new features can be integrated efficiently, and investigations to troubleshoot gateway issues are addressed from top to bottom. Over the past few years, RDK has evolved to cover both Cable Video (RDK-V) and Broadband (RDK-B) gateways, as well as, multiple network types including hybrid fiber/coax, GPON, and DSL.
Today, RDK has been deployed on more than 60 million devices worldwide, a 20% increase from a year ago.
The Summit announced multiple innovations to the RDK Video and Broadband platforms:
- The release of RDK-4, built on Firebolt, Thunder, RDK OS, and Lightening application language to accelerate the development of platforms and applications.
- RDK 4 supports Lightening, HTML5, and Streaming apps integrated through Firebolt
- RDK 4 to assist pre-integrated premium apps, pre-integrated app store, voice-enabled, Lightening app framework
- Lightening framework to provide improved progress, performance, and velocity
- Firebolt to include full-featured WP Webkit Browser
- Comcast rolling out the Flex interface on Lightening, with expectations to roll out X1 and build Stream on top of Lightening.
- Plans to use Lightening on applications, exhilarating memory utilization, fast app launches, and enabling multiple applications to run at once.
- Humax reveals Wi-Fi 6E gateway and STB voice assistant box supporting Alexa’s far-field voice recognition
- Downloadable Application Containers will work with RDK-V & RDK-B
Snapshot of the RDK Community Today:
- 450+ Components Hosted
- 100 New RDK Members
- 50 RDK Preferred Members
- 10K + Code Contributions
It is exciting the direction the RDK community is heading towards, with second-to-none architecture, the RDK 4 revolution is built by Operators for Operators.
