Open Cable boxes. Malone calls them' " Network Computers."..........
multichannel.com
'OPENCABLE' AIMS TO AVERT TURF WAR
By LESLIE ELLIS & FRED DAWSON
In a move reminiscent of NATO's role in the Balkans, the cable industry has launched the "OpenCable" initiative, aimed at winning support from warring Silicon Valley factions for standardization of next-generation set-top boxes.
Two weeks ago, key participants in cable's CEO-led development of new set-top specifications sent a letter and request for information to one-dozen computing firms on both sides of the battle between the Microsoft Corp./Intel Corp. "Wintel" alliance and the growing affiliation of companies supporting the network computer/Java software initiative spearheaded by Sun Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp. and Netscape Communications Corp.
Signed by John Malone, chairman and CEO of Tele-Communications Inc.; Bill Schleyer, president and chief operating officer of MediaOne; and Richard Green, CEO of Cable Television Laboratories Inc., the letter went to the top brass at Microsoft, Intel, Oracle subsidiary Navio Communications Inc. and other leading firms, sources said.
Alan Yates, senior product manager for Microsoft's Consumer Platforms Division, confirmed that a letter had been received by Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates, but he declined to discuss its contents or significance. One cable executive familiar with the concept said it is "way too early" to discuss OpenCable specifics, except to say that it is a continuation of an ongoing effort to develop a next-generation digital set-top box.
The OpenCable effort will mirror CableLabs' earlier work on cable modems, where "best-of-breed" solutions from varying vendors were selected for a specification.
The cable industry has already made considerable progress on key hardware specifications for the new appliance, under the direction of a CableLabs board-level task force led by Schleyer, Green noted. "A lot of features are defined," he said, including the modulation interface; an out-of-band control channel to add flexibility to handling of broadcast-digital channels; and "a rough parameter" for the tuner.
"We've issued a document [to the consumer-electronics industry] outlining what features should be in the [television] receiver to be interoperable with cable," Green said. "The next level of questions to be addressed concern security issues and the software interfaces."
While CableLabs has been discussing software interfaces with various computer companies at the staff level, sources said the effort required a higher-level intervention in order to get computer leaders focused on the questions surrounding the means by which future set-tops will exploit the power of software and microprocessors to deliver interactive, data-enriched services to TV sets. Both the Wintel and the Sun/Oracle camps are committed to the development of "thin client" appliances, which will lower the costs of achieving such capabilities, but the differences in their software-based solutions pose a threat to cable's ability to deliver an off-the-shelf, retail solution that unifies, rather than splinters, the consumer market.
In remarks to shareholders two weeks ago, Malone encapsulated the OpenCable vision -- without referring to it by name -- by calling for an "open and nonproprietary" approach to set-top hardware and software. "It's critical that the industry has to pick published and open standards," Malone said.
Malone repeatedly referred to the set-top as a "network computer," borrowing from Oracle Corp. terminology to describe a device that goes beyond digital-broadcast video.
The sub-$300 NC, within a year, will include cable-modem components, and it will run applications based on open scripting languages, like Sun's Java, he said.
But Microsoft, too, has embraced the low-cost computing concept for consumer appliances, contending that its Windows CE software system, used in conjunction with network-based computing power, both lowers the processing requirements of the client device and allows such devices to exploit the vast range of applications that have been developed on the Microsoft foundation.
Malone was emphatic in saying that he'd rather not be drawn into the high-stakes Silicon Valley turf war. Said another MSO executive, asking not to be named, "That battle has been going on for a while, but, now, the question is whether or not we're going to be sucked into it, as an industry."
Already, the industry, through MSOs' pursuit of high-speed data, is confronting the potential divisiveness of the software war, with some data providers leaning toward the use of Netscape-based applications and others linking more closely to Microsoft. For example, the division poses a challenge to MSOs in efforts to unify on a common architecture for distribution of data signals through a national backbone connection, noted Milo Medin, vice president for @Home Network.
"In order to be able to scale our network at a consistent level of service quality, we have to set limits on our software environment," Medin said, noting that the company is making use of back-office and other applications linked to Netscape's browser. "This doesn't mean that we're shutting anybody out, but it does mean that we can't meet our goals and accommodate 20 different software approaches to a given task."
Ideally, the cable industry would like to use its distributed-computing architecture, buttressed with multiservice-capable next-generation servers and high-speed links, to deliver data streams to set-tops, as well as to personal computers, without having to lock into a universal operating system. New software products like Java and Lucent Technologies Inc.'s Inferno are designed to allow applications built on these products to run on all types of end-user clients, as long as those clients are equipped with "virtual engines" that serve as interfaces between the applications and the underlying operating software.
But Sun and its allies -- which now include Lucent, as the result of a pact ensuring compatibility between Inferno- and Java-enabled devices -- have focused most of their attention on the business market, leaving it to Microsoft and its allies to develop applications, such as video-streaming and multiplayer online gaming, for the mass-consumer market. As a result, many of the applications most appealing to cable are those least capable of meeting the universal-distribution requirements underlying the OpenCable initiative.
"The reason why Microsoft succeeded in winning wide support for ASF [Active Streaming Format] is that there was no alternative out there," noted Pete Zaballos, marketing vice president at video-streaming-supplier Vivo Software Co., in reference to the sweeping realignment in Internet video triggered by Microsoft last month. "The people at Netscape, Oracle and Sun have been asleep at the switch when it comes to support for video on the Web."
But the Sun alliance is moving to catch up, with Oracle pushing consumer applications on the appliance side and Sun now setting up the Sun Consumer Technologies Group in conjunction with its recent acquisition of Diba Inc., a company that certifies compliance of service providers with the Java-based NC platform. For its part, Netscape two weeks ago announced that it would deliver a "pure Java" version of its Navigator client software next year as part of its new commitment to deliver more than 100 million copies of its Navigator 4.0 Web-browsing software to home users.
"This announcement, combined with the inclusion of our HTML [hypertext markup language] component in the Java Development Kit, represents a tremendous step toward our goal of making Netscape client technology ubiquitous in both homes and businesses," said James Barksdale, Netscape president and CEO, in a prepared statement.
Whether cable's offer of a majority of U.S. households as a potential market for data-enhanced TV services is sufficient to bring the warring Silicon Valley factions together remains to be seen. But, in the meantime, it's clear that decisions will have to be made that inevitably force cable operators to choose one camp over the other.
Further evidence of turf selection surfaced last week, as @Home backed a proposed standard drafted by Netscape, Marimba Inc. and Novell Inc. for submission to the World Wide Web Consortium. The draft asks for a new industry protocol, called "Distribution and Replication Protocol," that will enhance existing HTTP (hypertext transport protocol) methods of lessening network congestion associated with sending full HTTP pages over the Internet.
"We view this protocol as a major advance in enabling a much more robust and reliable replication and distribution capability in the Internet, which we view as critical in truly making the Internet a great content platform," Medin said, in a prepared statement.
Matt Wolfrom, a spokesman for @Home, explained that DRP will help by minimizing the amount of network traffic associated with keeping cached Web content fresh. @Home monitors its cached Web pages every 15 minutes, then reloads any pages that have changed by pulling material from the original site. With DRP, only those bits that have changed are sent, Wolfrom said. |
