Maya, this Sun/Canal Plus link you have been reporting on seems to have merit. It's based on the Jacksonville deployment that C-Cube and Divicom participated in.........
eet.com
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(03/07/01, 4:26 p.m. EST)
SAN MATEO, Calif. — In an effort to drive Java deeper into a global interactive TV market, Canal+ Technologies (Paris), a subsidiary of Canal+, is partnering with Sun Microsystems Inc.
Canal+ Technologies is licensing Sun's PersonalJava platform. Sun, in turn, is investing an undisclosed amount in the French operation.
The two companies, "which have often found themselves sitting on the same side" in industry committees developing open standards for interactive TV, are formally joining forces "to get great results, not just good results, in accelerating Java technology deployment," said Arthur Orduna, vice president of marketing at Canal+ Technologies.
Under the agreement, Canal+ Technologies, a provider of digital and interactive TV middleware, will license Sun's PersonalJava platform for integration with Canal's MediaHighway middleware solution. Canal+ will also port its cable head-end infrastructure products to Sun's Solaris operating environment.
Canal+ Technologies is no stranger to Java: More than two years ago it became the first company to develop, embed and demonstrate a clean-room implementation of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on its own platform. Canal+'s MediaHighway — integrated with that clean-room JVM — has already been designed into digital cable boxes built by Philips, Pace and Pioneer, and supplied to AT&T (formerly MediaOne), in the Jacksonville, Fla., market. MediaOne's goal at the time was to deploy interactive TV applications written in Java.
Ordana called that box "good proof of concept for Java," but also said the clean-room JVM used in the set-tops in Jacksonville was "somewhat limited and constrained."
By licensing PersonalJava, Canal+ intends to tap into the comprehensive Java engineering resources available at Sun, and obtain direct access to the PersonalJava compliancy kit and testing environment that Sun developed.
Emerging open standards specifications — such as the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) developed by Europe's Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) group and the OpenCable platform, being developed by CableLabs in the United States — feature Java as an integral element. Although such standards do not necessarily require vendors to directly license PersonalJava from Sun, "We've found that it makes a lot of sense to have a formal business relationship with Sun, so that we can make a true market-compliant product," Orduna explained.
Toward that end, Canal+ interactive TV application servers that allow real-time interactive gaming or chat applications will also be ported to the Sun platform. "The goal is so that network operators can buy end-to-end Canal+ and Sun-enabled systems," Orduna explained.
The two companies declined to disclose how much money Sun has pumped into Canal+ Technologies. Sun, however, is the fourth company to invest in Canal+ Technologies recently, joining Sony Corp., Thomson Multimedia and Sogecable, a network operator in Spain. The four companies combined now own a little more than 10 percent of Canal+ Technologies, according to Orduna.
The development of Java-enabled MHP and OpenCable specifications are both nearing completion. Orduna said that the DVB group's MHP-compliant products will reach consumers before the end of this year in Europe, while the OpenCable platform will become available for testing in the United States by the end of this year. |
