The Power TV Alliance. SGS Thomson's win for a pegasus box is probably from Thomson Multimedia. The others could use a C-Cube decoder. Only SA, Pioneer, and Toshiba have deals to sell the box. Pegasus....................
powertv.com
POWER Alliance
Looking to extend the advanced TV standards further, PowerTV organized and currently chairs the Partners In Open Wideband Engineering Resources (POWER) Alliance, an open, cross-industry consortium dedicated to fostering open standards for the emerging Interactive TV marketplace. Founded by PowerTV in 1995, the POWER Alliance currently has eight members representing leaders in ITV-related hardware and software, semiconductor products, operating systems, and authoring/programming tools. Other POWER Alliance members are Argonaut Technologies, Ltd.; C-Cube Microsystems, Inc.; Scala, Inc.; Scientific-Atlanta, Inc.; Software Development Systems, Inc.; Sybase, Inc.; Oracle Corporation; and 3DLabs, Inc.
The goals of the Alliance are to establish compatibility guidelines for hardware and software members, support open-architecture initiatives related to interactive TV, and serve as a resource for information regarding the current and future advanced TV market.
PowerTV Software Products
PowerTV's flagship product, introduced in the summer of 1995, is an open operating system platform for the development, display, and control of interactive entertainment and information services delivered across communications networks. The operating system has been deployed in four major advanced TV trials.
The PowerTV OS is designed to exist in a ROM-based system and has a very small memory footprint which helps to keep costs low. It employs industry-standard technologies--including MPEG-2, DAVIC, DSM-CC, and IMA PCM--to facilitate interoperability with equipment, networks, and content from multiple vendors. Consistent APIs and common data formats insulate applications from hardware and network differences for cross-platform interoperability, thus protecting application investment.
The PowerTV OS represents the first fully open-architecture OS solution for advanced TV and is a breakthrough in operating system design and functionality for set-top applications. The 32-bit architecture offers features such as the PowerKernel - a fully-preemptive, multi-threaded kernel optimized for RISC processors, support for multiple simultaneous applications, dynamic application and module linking and loading, video overlay and capture support, extensive 2-D graphics, and anti-aliased text and graphics.
PowerTV Hardware Products
PowerTV is one of the few companies taking a complete systems view of the advanced TV industry -- with an integrated hardware and software solution. The company's Eagle media compositor is designed for high-speed processing, acceleration, composition, and presentation of interactive graphics and audio. Eagle provides a strategic complement to the operating system. This system approach allows PowerTV's OEM partners to deliver the highest quality interactive multimedia products at attractive consumer price points and on the required schedules, while ensuring compatibility of applications with a variety of hardware and system implementations.
The Eagle media compositor provides cost-effective support for high-quality multimedia. Offering a superset of the DAVIC graphics and audio standards, Eagle accelerates the rendering performance of graphics, imagery, and text, and composites these images with live video from digital or analog sources. It also supports the scaling of digitized motion video, both MPEG and analog, as well as alpha blending and anti-aliasing of graphics and video.
PowerTV Applications
The PowerTV operating system provides a rich development environment for content developers to create and implement interactive applications. The company also offers a number of applications to network providers including a TV-centric Web browser, which combines the power of the interactive environment with the large-scale network available through the World Wide Web. PowerTV is developing the BaliTM application framework, which includes a version of Java specifically tailored for television.
PowerTV Customers
Hardware Manufacturers
PowerTV is currently working with a number of major OEMs, including Thomson Multimedia, Scientific-Atlanta, Pioneer, Toshiba and Mitsubishi to incorporate the PowerTV OS and Eagle technology into a variety of peripherals. We are committed to licensing our technology to additional hardware manufacturers and to being the de facto standard in advanced TV. |
