Open Cable bids due on Friday. This is a set top computer.................
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Broadband Bulletin: CableLabs OpenCable Project
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If you've got a date this weekend with someone on the OpenCable staff at CableLabs, you might want to curl up with a good book instead. Friday is the deadline for vendors to submit proposals for the consortium's OpenCable initiative, an effort to develop next-generation interoperable set-top boxes, and the staff will work over the weekend, Mike Schwartz, a CableLabs VP, says. OpenCable plans to review the responses this weekend and turn around a summary report by next week to be made available to its members. It will then solicit vendors to author specific elements of the specs, which will be published, as amended during the review and comment process, to the vendor community and to CableLabs members. Schwartz did not offer a timeframe beyond the issue of the report next week; however, CableLabs' letter to the vendor community suggests the digital set-top computer will be available in 1998.
Though vendors may prefer to have proprietary systems, the implementation of standards will bring down costs for the cable op, Deutsche Morgan Grenfell analyst Doug Shapiro says. "If you do have interoperability standards what you are going to have is a bunch of people driving costs down a lot faster than would have occurred if that process were left in the hands of manufacturers," he adds. Open standards will also help the balance sheets of cable ops, which won't have to cough up all the money to fund the necessary development, as they would have to if systems were proprietary, Shapiro notes. |
