VentureBeat

It’s painful to get satellite TV service installed at your home because technicians have to spend a lot of time wiring multiple set-top boxes to a single dish antenna.

Entropic Communications has a solution that eliminates that problem. And today, the San Diego, Calif. company is announcing that DirecTV is adopting its chips.

The company’s chip is called a “channel stack switch” and it will be built into a new DirecTV satellite dish. Earlier this year, DirecTV said it would include the Entropic chips in its newest set-top boxes. Now you don’t have be shy about adding three or four DirecTV boxes to your home because the switch chip lets all of those boxes use the same wire back to the satellite dish on the roof. It used to take six cables to hook up four units — a high-definition digital video recorder, a standard DVR, and two standard set-tops. These days, about three set-tops per home is the average. Read the rest of this entry »