Java TV: Set-Top Box Contender
By Karen J. Bannan and Charles Babcock
June 14, 1999 8:33 AM ET
When it comes to the TV set-top box, Sun Microsystems' general product manager for Java TV, Jim Theberge, says Java TV is the set-top box contender with the right technology at the right time.
"In the future, digital TV's interactive component will be enabled by Java," he said. Theberge can say this with some conviction, because the two standards bodies for digital TV - the Advanced Television Standards Committee in the U.S. and the Digital Video Broadcast committee in Europe - are building the Java Virtual Machine into their plans for how digital TV will operate, he said.
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At the same time, Microsoft is making a bid to get its Windows CE into more set-top boxes, through a recent $5 billion investment in AT&T and its interactive cable services. "Microsoft investing in AT&T is a foot in the doorway" of digital TV, said Sean Badding, an analyst at the Carmel Group. The move means Windows CE will go into 10 million high-performance set-top boxes.
In addition, Microsoft in 1997 purchased WebTV Networks, the maker of software that converts a TV and its set-top box into an interactive, Web surfing medium. After the purchase, WebTV announced it was switching from its plans to use a Java-based set-top box system to a Windows CE-based system, Sun Vice President Jon Kannegaard said.
"They started out as quite a proponent of Java TV," Kannegaard said; the Silicon Valley company even hired a member of his staff. But in 1997, after being acquired by Microsoft, "they changed their technology point of view," he said.
Tony Faustini, technical director of intellectual property at WebTV, said the company decided to switch to a Windows CE approach after technical staff members raised concerns about the size of Java's footprint in a memory-constrained set-top box, as well as its performance as compared to standard C programs.
The leading set-top box suppliers, Scientific-Atlanta and General Instrument, said they will support both Java and Windows CE. They said they don't care which system a cable operator wishes to implement, as long as they can keep the price of the set-top box less than $399.
Theberge said Java TV is likely to become the technology of choice because Sun and its partners have assembled a set of Application Programming Interfaces that provide controls for all the functions that set-top box software needs to perform, including presentation components, channel switching and image capture.
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