Pace's next generation box - 23gbyte hard disk, 8 hour recording...
inside-cable.co.uk
Pace has confirmed its dominant position in the digital settop market in the UK – it supplies boxes for all the UK's cable operators, Sky Digital and now Kingston's ADSL service.
The NTL box (which Inside Cable & Telecoms Europe believes will now be trialled before Christmas in Scotland) includes the first implementation of a DVB-RC cable modem. The CWC box and that being used by Telewest are very similar, but use the DOCSIS standard. All three systems are offering an Ethernet port, for connection to a home PC or a network hub.
The boxes for the Kingston ADSL service are based on the Element 14 (formerly Acorn) development which was acquired by Pace earlier in the year.
The Pace 3875 set-top features high quality MPEG-2 decoding, support for Java applications and a choice of ATM or ethernet interfaces. The television services are delivered over IP protocol and it is video-server neutral.
Pace's next generation box, due for launch in 2000, will incorporate a 23gbyte hard disk. This will be capable of recording over 8 hours of digital video, but will also be accessible to service providers for downloading information services overnight.
By August 1999 Pace had manufactured over 2,500,000 digital set-top boxes delivered to 19 international broadcasters in the UK, Europe, Latin America, Australasia and the Far East. This landmark was reached less than four years after Pace delivered the world's first MPEG-2 digital boxes in volume to Australia in August 1995. The company has also manufactured 6.5 million analogue set-top boxes since it entered the pay television market in 1987.
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