Sony settop News; analysts: do you now want to believe Umesh or are you still going to question the fuzzy future?
Sony to spin next-gen set-top for Cablevision
1/9/2001
Jan. 09, 2001 (Electronic Engineering Times - CMP via COMTEX) -- Las Vegas - Sony Electronics Inc. has developed a next-generation interactive digital cable set-top platform to Cablevision Systems Corp.'s specs in a collaboration billed as a billion-dollar deal. Sony said the move cements its commitment to become a full-fledged player in the U.S. cable set-top market.
Under the Cablevision agreement, announced here Jan. 5 on the eve of the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show, Sony will manufacture and ship up to 3 million boxes, collectively valued at about $1 billion, to the cable operator over a three-year period starting this year.
The advanced set-top, based on an R5000-class, 300-Mips application pro-cessor from NEC Corp., promises a sophisticated graphical user interface and such applications as video-on-demand, e-commerce, interactive TV and e-mail. It provides always-on access to a managed Web environment featuring customized Internet and local content and a broadband cable modem that enables a high-speed bidirectional interactive connection. The box comes with 32 Mbytes of DRAM and a 16-Mbyte flash memory.
Tony Aoki, director of business development for Sony Electronics' Network Entertainment of America Division, said the set-top's software, hardware and middleware are fully integrated with the head-end operations.
But in a move that may surprise some in the industry, Sony passed on its own Aperios operating system as the OS for the box. "After evaluating a variety of operating systems, including Aperios, and the availability of tool sets, we decided to use VxWorks," said Aoki. "Time-to-market was the most critical factor in this decision."
Further, the set-top uses none of the off-the-shelf middleware available from such vendors as Liberate, Microsoft Corp., OpenTV and Canal+. "At the time of our initial design phase-the fall of 1999-none of the middleware was ready to our satisfaction," Aoki said. "Knowing that much of Cablevision's specification was still a moving target at that stage, we figured that writing our own middleware would give us much-needed flexibility."
Sony thus developed its own TV media control handlers for implementation in middleware. A content developers' kit will allow third-party application developers to write to the Sony middleware.
The current-generation box supports HTML and JavaScript but not Personal Java. Aoki said Cablevision's road map requires the inclusion of Personal Java support in a future implementation.
Again, because Sony engineers needed to finish the advanced set-top design more than a year ago, the box-already manufactured in volume in Japan and demonstrated at CES-packs somewhat complex, discrete ICs in place of the integrated chip sets that have more recently become available.
The current-generation set-top uses ATI's 3-D graphics controller, C-Cube Microsystems' MPEG-2 audio/video decoder and Sony IEEE-1394 silicon that provides digital transmission content protection. The set-top is not equipped to decode digital high-definition TV signals, but the IEEE-1394 silicon will be used for "passing through HDTV signals" to another set-top or HDTV set, according to Aoki.
To meet a Cablevision requirement, Sony also took the unusual route of incorporating two cable-modem chips: one based on the Data over Cable System Interface Spec and the other on the Digital Audio-Visual Council spec. The Docsis chip, supplied by Conexant, provides in-band video functions, primarily for bringing Web pages and Java applications to the set-top. The Davic chip, supplied by C-Cube, offers an out-of-band channel to send critical system information.
Hacking concerns
"Cablevision did not want to use Docsis' in-band channel for sending system information, because they are concerned that its security system could be hacked," Aoki said.
Cablevision, for its part, is touting the set-top's open-platform characteristics. To ease the plug-in of peripherals, the box comes with two Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports in addition to its IEEE-1394 port. Two smart card slots are provided to enable card-based e-commerce and security applications.
To meet a Federal Communications Commission requirement intended to allow set-tops to be sold on the retail market, the first-generation box provides space for installation of a point-of-deployment (POD) module. But it does not come with the module itself, since "the POD specification wasn't final" by manufacturing time, Aoki said. The Sony cable set-tops will be directly supplied to Cablevision.
At Cablevision's request, Sony also developed another interactive digital cable receiver, designed as a cost-effective, secondary unit for watching movies. The box comes with a Davic cable modem, 32 Mbytes of DRAM and 8 Mbytes of flash but lacks USB and IEEE-1394 ports.
Sony hopes to use the platform, which can be modified to meet other cable operators' system requirements, as a springboard into the broader U.S. market. While the current version runs Sony middleware, "if cable operators want us to use other middleware, our architecture is modular enough to accommodate that need," Aoki said.
Sony has already manufactured several hundred set-tops for Cablevision and plans to ship several thousand units to the cable operator by the end of the month. Cablevision plans to test the units in a pilot program involving a few hundred homes over the next several months and to kick off commercial deployment in the second half. Full deployment to Cablevision's 3 million subscribers is expected by the end of 2003.
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