Broadcom and Atheros, Qualcomm’s networking division, published a joint release announcing the two companies’ support for the HomePlug electronics power line standard family. This willingness encompasses the newly sanctioned HomePlug AV2 as well, which has been given the credit for being the foundation of the IEEE 1905.1 draft standard. Dan Marotta, the head of the Broadcom Communications Group said this in a statement:

“Broadcom recognizes and supports customers’ demand for multi-vendor supply of HomePlugAV technology. Broadcom is committed to HomePlugAV with mature hardware and firmware products that meet the interoperability and performance needs of our customers. As the world’s largest supplier of broadband modems and shipping over 100 million modems per year, we will continue to deliver the benefits of high performance home networks built on deployed industry standards and to accelerate time-to-market for future products.”

Broadcom and Qualcomm have collaborated on research in this area to substantiate their latest buzzworthy update. The two claim that tests comparing chipsets by the two manufacturers validated that HomePlug AV solutions live up to at least some of the fuss across many varying real-life areas of use.

HomePlug’s advantages are most apparent in home networks, where video streaming accounts for a growing percentage of household bandwidth consumption. This is an area Broadcom is investing in from several angles, and CES proved to be a big milestone for the company.

We’ve learned that it has teamed-up with Myriad to install Android on its set-top boxes,  in order to make thousands of apps available to users on their TVs while also adding more interactive functionality. Sling Media is an early supporter, and has entered into an agreement with Broadcom to feature its SDK on the latter’s latest set-top box optimized SoC. Both of the firms have identified mobile as a key element in their content streaming strategies.