Matt, Good questions. Noticed in Friday's WSJ that Intel has taken the "tel" partially out of "Wintel".
Message 2899892
My read is that the NC will be the cornerstone of the STB (set-top box). This market will rival the PC market within a few years since everyone has a TV and to upgrade to digital TV, most will need a STB. This isn't solely a US analog to digital TV upgrade, it's worldwide.
Interesting to note from the WSJ article that Intel is providing $100 million of seed money to HDTV content providers like PBS and other companies which will help standardize the transition (DBS companies, cable sytems, broadcasters, MMDS, etc.).
The real "sleeper" in the NC game is ZE. Sure, it's been a bleeding dog of a stock, much like Intel until about 1995. With well over $1 billion in annual sales, ZE is trading only at about a $500 million market capitalization. LGE,owns 55% of ZE. What's most interesting about Zenith is that it is coming out with a NCTV in 1998 based on the Oracle/Intel model and will be the first to sell HDTV sets and Divx players. Divi-Com/CUBE is another "best of breed" Zenith partner for Zenith's STBs. Zenith has some major STB contracts on the books, $1 billion plus with Americast and another $200-300K with a subsidiary of News Corp.
Also potential sleepers in the transition from analog to digital TVs are the DBS companies and News Corp (75% coverage of the world's TVs, via DBS, cable and direct brodcast, and, big in sports). |
