[Conference chat and Gates' WebTV mystery]
<<<[JS] Understands that Amati will not own ADSL despite head start and patents. Conservatively estimates Amati will get 30% of the business which leaves plenty for others to get and encourages broad competition that will help to rapidly develop the ADSL industry.>>>
Doc --
Good report and thanks for posting! Reading what JS said about the ADSL market, I have to smile. "Amati's only getting 1/3 of the market????" I guess I can handle that.
<<< No comment made about Orckit licensing from Amati at this time.>>>
Orckit may not be discussing licensing, but I believe Fujitsu is. Of course they may be discussing making chips that have nothing to do with Orckit at all. That would even be better. [Actually, I've heard they're talking, but don't know if it's about making chips. . . don't anyone get excited.]
<<Wonder where this will leave 3COM's ethernet NIC business.>>>
I'll leave it to the engineers to answer this one. Right now I'm trying to figure out what Bill Gates has up his sleeve with the WebTV announcement set for Tuesday. I doubt it has anything to do with ADSL but the part about highspeed bandwidth over telephone wires does make me curious. And it doesn't hurt that Craig Mundie --- the MSFT VP who handled the media for the ADSL trials in Redmond and owns an Amati Overture 8 --- is involved.
From Business Week:
<<<
businessweek.com
WHY MICROSOFT IS GLUED TO THE TUBE
A new, souped-up version of WebTV is what made Gates bite
It was the wee hours of the morning on Apr. 6, and the fax machine at the Treasure Island Hotel in Las Vegas was furiously cranking out an endless stream of pages. Harried hotel staffers dressed as pirates dashed back and forth to a suite on the eighth floor, where Steve Perlman and Phil Goldman--two of the three founders of WebTV Networks --were huddled with Craig Mundie, a senior VP at Microsoft. The faxes from Microsoft bore details of the bombshell deal they would soon announce: Microsoft would pay $425 million for WebTV, a Silicon Valley startup that was losing money, had a so-so product, customer.
Had Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates III lost his mind?
For the answer, tune in on Sept. 16, when Microsoft unveils a new, souped-up version of its WebTV system for surfing the Net via TV. That product, along with the team that built it--Perlman, Goldman, and co-founder Bruce Leak--is the real reason Gates bought the company. Gates has said that the WebTV acquisition is Microsoft's riskiest gambit to date. But if it's successful, it could be the Trojan Horse the software giant has been searching for to ride into millions of living rooms around the world.
WebTV and Net cruising devices made by a slew of rivals may well prove to be the first successful information appliances. These simplified computing devices tap into the power of the Net, are much easier to use than PCs, and cost a fraction of the price. So far, corporations have been slow to trade in their PCs for slimmed-down Net models, such as ''network computers'' or NetPCs (page 102). But companies from Microsoft to RCA to Sony are betting that Web appliances will catch on with consumers.
Owning a big chunk of this market is a must for Microsoft. To keep up its 30% average annual growth, the software titan must find new markets to conquer beyond its PC stronghold. And what better place than TV, now in 98% of U.S. homes, vs. just 40% for PCs? In coming years, television sets are expected to become a major portal to the Net--and a whole new set of digital programming that will be offered over it. Some 1 million Net-ready TVs will be in U.S. homes by 2000, predicts Forrester Research Inc. The software that runs on them could become as lucrative as the Windows software that runs on most PCs--one reason why the new WebTV box will run a scaled-down version of Windows. ''We want to be the software supplier...the nonPC equivalent to Windows,'' says Mundie.
WHIZ CHIP. So what does WebTV have up its remote control? Perlman,
WebTV's fiery young chief executive, isn't talking. But insiders say the company has come up with technology that helps get around the current bandwidth limitations of the Net to deliver high-quality, high-speed Web images and video. At the heart of this, say insiders, is an innovative chip that crams the capabilities of a TV tuner, cable modem, and a high-speed PC modem into one low-cost unit. That, and other tricks, help WebTV begin to blur the distinction between TV programming and Web fare. That bandwidth-busting technology has helped WebTV snag new licensees, such as Hitachi Ltd. and Mitsubishi Corp., to make the new boxes.
The boxes may be impressive, but they're just a means to a bigger end: creating a network that will deliver new kinds of digital content to homes. ''We intend to define mass-market media for the next century,'' says the cocksure Perlman. WebTV is putting the finishing touches on a revamped Net-TV service that provides a glimpse into how media might be delivered in the future. The centerpiece: an improved program guide, called Explore, that has a dozen or so categories, such as news, sports, and shopping, and serves as a launching point to Web sites and TV programming. The idea, says Stacy Jolna, WebTV's
vice-president for programming and a former CNN executive, is ''to showcase the best content on the Web and TV.''
BEST OF BOTH. At first, that will mostly be brand-name content from Web sites. But as content creators take advantage of the new WebTV, viewers will be able to tune into, say, the Grammy Awards and click the remote to get more info on award-winning artist Toni Braxton, listen to her latest CD, and purchase a ticket to one of her concerts. Broadcasters could soon start offering data services over the airwaves as well--stats, for example, could be zipped off the Net along with the broadcast of a sporting event. Such enhanced programming is ''in everybody's business plan,'' says Larry Gerbrandt, an analyst at Paul Kagan Associates in Carmel, Calif.
Also in those business plans: piles of revenue from online advertising, transactions, and subscription fees. The potential is huge: Jupiter Communications Co. predicts that online revenue from these sources will swell from $1 billion in 1996 to $23.8 billion by 2000. Gates recently told a gathering of Wall Street analysts that the Net-TV market is a ''completely unproven business in terms of volume and royalty.'' But he added: ''Someone will come along and do some great software to get a revenue stream...and that someone could be us.''>>>
Compare the technology with what was trialed by MCI in Iowa:
mci.com
NEC = Amati mci.com
Amati's press from same trial:
amati.com
<<<Among the objectives of the trial, the companies wanted to assess ADSL as a technically and economically viable delivery mechanism for subscription broadcast services to residential users, to determine video quality performance and to evaluate ADSL transmission and exchange equipment and customer premises installation issues.
"This trial with NEC and MCI is important to Amati for several reasons," said Jim Steenbergen, President and CEO, Amati Communications. "First, it permits Amati to closely work with MCI, a major telephone service provider in the U.S. It strengthens our relationship with NEC in terms of our previous VDSL announcements and now our ADSL work.
"It further validates the Amati DMT technology as the best solution for high-speed transmissions over copper wire. And, it helps confirm the knowledge gained in several overseas trials that a market for high quality video can exist assuming the appropriate technology is made available."
The ADSL/DMT modems are supplied by Amati to NEC. Amati manufactures a plug-in unit for the switch and a remote modem that interfaces to the NEC set-top box in the home. The technology used in the modems is the same as that used in the Amati Overture 8 ADSL/DMT modems and the Amati Allegro ADSL Access Concentrator. >>>
If you don't have time for all the MCI slides, skip to these:
mci.com
mci.com
Comments, anyone? How far off base am I?
Cheers!
Past |
