Reason for Price Action Today?
Candace -
I just noticed this - perhaps this is a reason??
Steve
news.com
Sci-Atlanta, GI unveil new cable set-tops
By Jim Davis
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 15, 1999, 6:55 a.m. PT
CHICAGO--The two largest set-top box suppliers in the United States will this week take the wraps off of hardware that
could help the cable industry fulfill promises of interactive television and greater content choice.
Scientific-Atlanta and General Instrument took the occasion of the cable industry's National Cable Television Association Cable '99
trade show to show off a variety of new cable set-top boxes that are beginning to regularly follow a well established PC industry
pattern of adding more memory, more processing power, and more applications every few months.
Scientific-Atlanta (S-A), for instance, unveiled three new cable set-top converters that will fill out its current digital set-top lineup. At
the low end, S-A is offering a lower cost version of the Explorer 2000 that still allows for interactive features like email and Internet
access, but has fewer connection ports for external devices.
At the high end, the new Explorer 6000 will have more than five times as much processing power as
the Explorer 2000 currently being shipped, better graphics capabilities, and will be able to run any
applications developed for the Explorer 2000, an important item for cable operators, who don't want to
have to create a new program for every new box that comes along.
Cable customers will have the ability to decode a variety of high definition TV (HDTV) formats,
depending on which formats the cable operators decide to send through their systems. The higher
quality the format, the more processing power and memory are needed in the box, which raises cost.
Services now marketed as "digital TV" by cable companies only offer more channels for traditional,
analog TVs. True digital TV, on the other hand, promises the ability to display content on souped up
TVs with greater picture quality than is possible now.
Cable operators have been slow to pass along HDTV signals because the higher quality signals take
up more space in their "pipeline," meaning fewer revenue generating programs can be sent through
the system. Still, the news is an indication that HDTV is at least on the roadmap for the industry
now; last year when DTV broadcasts officially started there seemed to be little hope that consumers
would get HDTV from their cable operators.
Just as importantly, the Explorer 6000 is being designed so that it can be sold at retail stores, which will be required by the
Federal Communications Commission in July of 2000. The system is expected to go into production in the second quarter of 2000.
All told, the demand for digital set-top boxes has been growing rapidly, which is partly owing to the better signal quality and the
electronic program guides these devices offer. S-A said the company will double its production capacity to 500,000 units per
quarter by the end of 1999, up from earlier year-end estimates.
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