DTV OEMs confused..........................................
techweb.cmp.com
Amid the confusion, OEMs ponder their DTV choices
By Rick Boyd-Merritt
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Digital TV will help PC makers move deeper into the territory of consumer electronics. But lacking any clear road map for DTV silicon and services, it is still far from clear what kinds of products they should build and when they should build them. That explains what some PC executives describe as the industry's strange mix of exuberance and pessimism over digital TV.
"Cost is the dominant factor," said Chris Pedersen, brand manager in Hewlett-Packard Co.'s home-products division. "We are looking for a low-cost [DTV] solution well-integrated with PC graphics, and we are not seeing any that are close to our needs."
Pedersen said the company will likely sit on the sidelines for the first generation or so of PC-based DTV receivers, which are expected to ship by the end of the year. "We'll see a chicken-and-egg situation where some people will market stuff that's too expensive to get volumes up and prices down," he said, adding that offering the first products in a new area is like hosting "a very expensive focus group."
"The challenging area is really cost," echoed Dean Klein, chief technology officer of Micron Electronics Inc. (Nampa, Idaho). "Solutions will emerge, but right now there is not anything you could exactly say is well-optimized for the PC." He noted that HDTV will require four times the processing punch of DVD decode.
Micron reportedly showed a hybrid PC/TV at Comdex in November, based on a version of the company's Stiletto chip set. Aimed at supporting today's terrestrial analog or digital satellite TV broadcasts, the system is said to be timed for launch with the release of Microsoft's Windows 98, but it's unclear when it might support terrestrial digital- HDTV broadcasts.
"Just to tune in a digital broadcast signal is a pretty expensive proposition at this point," said Mike Grubbs, director of convergence products at Gateway 2000 Inc. (North Sioux City, S.D.), speaking on the road to a DTV conference in London. "It will cost something like $1,000 just to enable that capability, and the bigger question is what you do with that capability once you've got it."
Gateway is widely expected to be the first PC maker to support digital TV, given its track record as the first to launch a commercial PC/TV receiver (the Destination). But Grubbs said it will take more than three years to get to a viable, mainstream DTV offering, because doing so will entail cooperation among broadcasters, content developers and infrastructure providers as well as receiver makers. "The evolution will take a lot longer than what we are used to in the PC industry. You could develop something by brute force today, but no one wants to be off by themselves."
Compaq Computer Corp. is also chanting the low-cost DTV mantra. Last summer, the Houston company launched its high-end PC Theater--a fully configured PC with TV tuner combined with a wide-screen progressive-scan monitor from Thomson Consumer Electronics. But sales have been negligible, according to sources. Compaq is directing future efforts more along the lines of its pioneering sub-$1,000 Presario consumer PC.
"Our first PC/TV product was really a statement," said a senior engineer in Compaq's consumer division who asked not to be identified. "We didn't expect we'd hit high volumes with it. No one has that kind of cash."
The new Compaq formula involves a blend of an improved audio/video experience, entertainment and new services--at a system price tag of less than $1,000. "There has to be a services angle for OEMs to make money," said the Compaq engineer.
Some in the PC industry seem to have accepted the premise that the central element to HDTV is the TV. Claude Leglise, vice president of Intel's content group, summed up the sentiment recently with this spin on a familiar campaign slogan: "It's the TV, stupid."
Windows or Windows CE won't be "a basic requirement for DTV," Leglise said last month. "What's expected is that when you fire up DTV, it does TV first."
In retracting Intel's stance recently that broadcasters should roll out DTV in lockstep with the computer industry's PC '9X road map, senior vice president Ron Whittier promised, "We are going to take the format issue out of the picture and focus our efforts to move the industry forward."
The microprocessor giant outlined a four-pronged DTV strategy: a basic set-top, an entry-level set-top computer, a premium set-top computer and a PC theater. The common denominator among them is their basis in Intel's X86 architecture: Intel envisions using the CPU's processing power to run the Hitachi-developed All Format Decoder algorithm to decode all 18 approved HDTV video formats in software.
But the other giant of the PC industry, Microsoft, hasn't backed away from its conviction that transmitting and receiving DTV signals in 18 different formats is "an overly simplified, idealistic view of DTV," in the words of Tom McMahon, architect of Microsoft's Digital TV and Video Consumer Platforms Division.
The company is still promoting "a phased approach," McMahon said. "Initially, the 480-line progressive video format will offer very cost-effective solutions not only for broadcasters but also for receiver manufacturers."
Private demo
At last month's Western Show, the company privately demonstrated 480-line progressive-scan (480p) digital pictures projected on a large-screen, direct-view Sony projection TV. The demo, which McMahon called a proof of concept, used a PC add-in card incorporating a Matsushita-developed chip.
"Microsoft is very cognizant of the basics of TV," said Steve Guggenheimer, senior product manager of DTV strategy at the company. "To Microsoft, DTV is first about high-quality audio and video. Second, it offers information access, and third, it provides enhanced, interactive content."
The PC industry is thus left without a clear road map for a box that Intel can power and Microsoft will support.
The sources at HP, Micron, Gateway and Compaq all said their ability to leverage the software base of Wintel applications is the strong suit they bring to the DTV market.
But they also indicated their belief that DTV decode and video-format conversion will not become a software task on a future Intel processor, and that the new market DTV represents will create a host of products, perhaps using a range of architectures.
"I believe there will be specialized platforms that do particular things, and a lot of them will be related to digital television," said Grubbs of Gateway. "Some of them might be Wintel products; others won't be." Grubbs added that Gateway's acquisition of Atari could play a role in such products.
--Junko Yoshida and Ron Wilson contributed to this story. |
