French company looks to reshape U.S. set-top market
eetimes.com
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(02/23/00, 5:24 p.m. EST)
PARIS ? Canal+, France's leading media company, has spun its
technology division into a separate company as it dives into the global
digital TV market. The spin-off, two-month-old Canal+ Technologies,
is close to signing one of the United States' largest cable set-top
vendors ? General Instrument (GI) or Scientific-Atlanta ? to build
set-tops based on the French company's technologies, a senior
executive of the new company said.
Canal+ Technologies is promising to reshape the U.S. cable industry,
whose solutions have been heavily dominated for decades by the
proprietary technologies of GI and Scientific-Atlanta. Canal+ is
gambling that a movement toward open solutions will gain momentum
among U.S. cable operators.
Alternative solutions
"We are making a very important first step [in the United States] to
offer alternative solutions to Scientific-Atlanta and GI," said
Jean-Francois Jezequel, vice president of sales and marketing at
Canal+ Technologies (Paris). The company's top priority for the next
18 months is "to really change the U.S. market and to become an
important player there," Jezequel said, adding that a deal with a U.S.
cable operator is in the works that could give his company leverage in
negotiating with U.S. set-top manufacturers. Jezequel declined to
name the cable operator.
Canal+ Technologies itself is not a set-top box vendor; its core
business is development of digital interactive middleware and
conditional access systems. The company designed a device layer
interface to make its own Mediahighway platform both CPU- and
operating-system-independent. The Canal+ Technologies division was
also the first to develop, embed and demonstrate a clean-room
implementation of the Java Virtual Machine on its platform more than
a year ago.
Martin Levine, a partner at Digital Technology Consulting (Dallas),
gives the French company good odds in its bid to become a global
player. "In terms of interactive content solutions, they are way ahead
of everyone," Levine said.
Canal+ made its first foray into the U.S. market late last year with a
design win from MediaOne. Under the agreement, MediaOne's
Jacksonville, Fla., system will use Mediahighway-enabled digital cable
boxes built by Philips, Pace and Pioneer.
As the industry goes digital, "U.S. cable operators will not be stuck
with technologies from one or two suppliers," Jezequel said.
Web box coming
By year's end, he said, the French company will roll out a set-top
architecture designed to marry the most popular aspects of the
Internet and TV worlds. The Media Web Box will be a more powerful
set-top than the current Canal+ platform. It will pack "a little more
memory ? a minimum of 8 Mbytes of DRAM and 8 Mbytes of flash
ROM; improved graphics, ready for hard disk drive incorporation; a 56k
modem or cable modem; a keyboard; and an interface for USB or
1394," Jezequel said.
The architecture will enable e-mail and Web surfing and will "let
viewers go directly to the right site instantaneously, without
depending on a search engine or too many clicks," Jezequel said. The
advantage of embedding the function into the digital broadcast
stream, he said, is that "broadcasters know exactly when to issue
specific HTML pages. We believe that HTML pages, truly synchronized
with video content, are really going to be the killer" application.
Canal+ may meet up in the marketplace with Microsoft Corp., which
has pursued cable-market presence through a series of investment
and financial deals. But Jezequel claimed Canal+ has an advantage in
that "all our solutions already exist, and they are being deployed. I
think Microsoft and we have very different backgrounds and are on
different routes."
Having been a division of Canal+, "we come from an operator's point
of view," he continued. The company has broad experience with
conditional access systems, and its Mediahighway platform was
designed from the ground up for compatibility with multiple operating
systems and microprocessors.
Canal+ has also been involved in the development of interactive TV
applications while working as a prime systems integrator with
European satellite, cable and terrestrial service operators. "We adapt
to standards very quickly," said Jezequel.
Citing an example, he noted that On Digital, a U.K. terrestrial digital
TV operator, had sought to use the Canal+ conditional access system
with MHEG-5 middleware rather than Canal+'s Mediahighway. Canal+
helped On Digital integrate those two software components and
completed the project on time, said Jezequel.
The French company hopes its willingness to work with standards and
its inherently flexible platform will help it succeed in the middleware
request-for-proposals procedure initiated by OpenCable, an industry
forum among U.S. cable operators and technology suppliers. Canal+
Technologies was one of 16 companies that responded to the
solicitation.
Company executives said the Java Virtual Machine is expected to be
an integral part of the OpenCable spec. "Java is a good candidate,
because it's a well-known language and it's easy to develop
applications" based on it, Jezequel said. "Java and browsers based on
XML or TVML could also coexist."
Beyond its U.S. market plans, Canal+ Technologies plans to enter the
Asian market soon. A deal with a unnamed cable operator in China is
expected to close this year, according to Jezequel. |
