Sigma announces that its highly integrated SMP8634 media processor is being used by Pirelli to power their line of IPTV set-top boxes, which are currently being deployed by two major European operators. Demand for IPTV has been sweeping across Europe over the past two years, where the vast majority of the 10 million worldwide IPTV subscribers are located. Over the past 2 years, nearly every major European Telco offers IPTV video services, with deployments split between the Microsoft Mediaroom platform and a range of Linux based platforms.

Pirelli’s portfolio of hybrid set-top boxes brings together IPTV and digital terrestrial TV in one multimedia platform, enabling a wide range of content bundles to be secured through a variety of conditional access system standards and digital rights management technologies. Pirelli's set-top boxes are based on Sigma’s single-chip technology and support legacy and new encoding standards such as H.264 and VC-1 at both standard and high definition. Pirelli set-top boxes can be equipped with hard drives of various storage capacities, providing additional capabilities such as local video recording, recorded-services playback, live TV pause, and time-shift recording.