Rupert wants some of YES Television......................
LONDON, April 9 (Reuters) - British Sky Broadcasting Plc is preparing to take a stake in Yes Television Plc, the video-on-demand company poised for an 800 million pound ($1.26 billion) stockmarket flotation, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
BSkyB, which has a joint venture with Yes's main customer Kingston Communications Plc , would join Hollywood studios Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co.'s Buena Vista as an investor in the fledgling company.
Yes refused to comment on any talks with major companies, the Telegraph said. "The majors are realising that Yes could become serious competition," the newspaper quoted an analyst as saying. ($1=.6330 Pound)
Pace supplies Kingston Communications Plc with set tops because Pace bought Element14, formerly Acorn..........
inside-cable.co.uk
Kingston Communications is to launch its ADSL high speed digital service on October 18th. Initially it will be available to 1,500 customers but it will quickly roll-out to all 155,000 customers in the Hull area. For the first time in Europe any home with a telephone line in the service area will be able to get a digital multimedia service.
TV programming will be available as well as high speed Internet access. TV subscribers will have a settop box from Element14 (formerly Acorn and now owned by Pace). The service and programme offering, under the Kingston Interactive Television name, will include the first full roll-out in Europe of video-on-demand.
Elmsdale Media?s Yes TV will offer a mix of top movies, music videos and television programmes. The system offers full control - pause, rewind or fast forward ? and once chosen the customers can watch their choice as many times as they like within a 24-hour rental period. Yes Television has completed agreements with three top movie studios - Warner Bros, Sony and Buena Vista (the Disney arm).
The Kingston ADSL system uses Internet compatible technology at 4mbps, ensuring cinema-quality pictures and sound.
¸Copyright 1999
Now the interesting part. Pace is a current C-Cube customer and Acorn used C-Cube in the very early trials.................
inside-cable.co.uk
The Customer Unit
OnLine Media's black settop box is a little deeper and higher than the standard settop convertor used in cable networks today but the unprepossessing appearance hides a very powerful computer.
OnLine Media is a new subsidiary of Acorn Computers Ltd, set up earlier in 1994 to develop new products for 'information highway' use. Acorn developed an innovative RISC processor in the mid 80s and spun out ARM Ltd in 1990 in which Apple also has a stake. ARM is a leading designer of RISC processors - low-cost, fast, powerful and with a low power consumption.
The ARM610 is used by Acorn in its latest Risc PC desktop computer. This is a workstation PC which, although it has its own operating system, is software compatible with IBM PCs.
This computer design provided the base for the OnLine Media settop. The communications for the network are provided by a card from ATM Ltd. This new venture was established in the early 1990s by Herman Hauser, one of Acorn's original founders, to develop communications products using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology. The ATM card in the settop uses another ARM610 processor.
Opening the box reveals further technology. A small card carries a C-Cube CL450 MPEG1 decompression chip for digital video replay, and there is circuitry for the remote control handset. There is also an internal tray to carry a CD-ROM drive.
The whole package comprises one of the most powerful computing devices any ordinary household is likely to have installed anywhere - yet it is a television product. |
