Over the last ten years, Motorola has moved from the first commercial digital STB to shipping fifty million digital STBs.
Back in 1996 General Instrument Corporation, later acquired by Motorola, shipped the first Digital Consumer Terminal (DCT) Model 1000 set-top to customers. It handled both analogue and digital signals travelling over the cable.
Of the 50m units they’ve shipped, 8m of them are high-definition (HD) capable receivers and over 5 million digital video recorders.
As a way of getting to grips with the scale of 50m Motorola set-tops stacked one on top of the other, we’re told that
- they would reach a height of over 11 million feet, almost 400 times that of Mount Everest
- placed end-to-end in a straight line would cover the distance from London to Sydney, Australia.