Legacy Product Maintenance and Support
For S3 Group’s cable, satellite and IPTV operator clients as well as our STB manufacturer and middleware and conditional access vendor clients S3 Group delivers product maintenance and support as required. Services often include planned minor feature upgrades, minor functionality improvements and reactive bug analysis and fixing.
S3 Group knows that Digital TV Set-Top Boxes (STBs) are different to many other consumer electronic devices because they are actively managed throughout their lifetime to continue to improve the breadth of capability and quality of experience for the end users.
This is nowhere more evident than in the constant trickle of problem reports that continue to be received by Operators through their service centers and customer service desks. In the initial launch cycle of a new STB, all of the parties involved in getting the new box to the market are still engaged in its development and can be called on to varying degrees to help resolve the problem.
Years later however when problems are reported, it can be harder to find the relevant expertise to analyze the problem and deliver a solution. This is particularly the case for legacy STBs which are no longer the subject of major feature or functionality upgrades but rather are being generally managed to extend their useful lifetime as long as possible.
With a reduced or entirely absent level of support from any one or more of the OEM, the silicon vendor, the CA vendor, the middleware vendor, the applications developer and/or the original software system integrator, the difficulty of fixing problems increases.
Depending on the contractual arrangement, the responsibility for fixing defects can rest with any one of these actors in the STB delivery chain from the Operator through to the OEM. Frequently these companies turn to S3 Group to fulfill this responsibility on their behalf. S3 Group has been involved in the delivery of digital STBs since 1994. This gives us the broad knowledge of the technologies in these legacy systems required to carefully navigate our way around the existing software in order to fix the defect without undermining the system stability.
For further information or to speak to a TV Technology team member please email us at tvtech(at)s3group.com
