A bird of a different color -- Motorola's Blackbird platform prepares to take wing
By Junko Yoshida
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products
Sector will use the IBC '98 broadcasters conference late next week to
detail a flexible consumer-electronics platform, dubbed Blackbird, on which
many of its hopes are riding.
The company expects Blackbird to fly into interactive game machines and
DVD players, digital terrestrial TV sets and set-top boxes.
But the launch comes as the semiconductor division, under continued
economic pressure, said it will layoff workers as part of an overhaul that
includes plans to dismantle its Consumer Systems Group.
Although Motorola declined to describe Blackbird in advance of its planned
Sept. 12 launch, sources who have been closely working with Motorola on
the project said the company is betting big on the success of what they said
will be a highly flexible platform. "Considering some industry forecasts
showing an Internet set-top and a game platform as an ideal combination,
this [Blackbird] strategy does make sense," said Abhishek Gami, an analyst
at William Blair & Co. (Chicago), an investment-banking firm.
At the heart of Blackbird is the Project X media processor from startup
VM Labs. Blackbird uses it to decode digital audio and video streams, to
process graphics and as a main processor in configurations for standalone
DVD or game players. Versions of Motorola's PowerPC will be used in
some high-end configurations.
Blackbird can also accommodate a variety of network interface modules
(NIMs), which could support terrestrial, cable, satellite or digital subscriber
line connections. "Motorola has designed very powerful network capabilities
into this NIM," one industry source said, The system will run the latest
release of the David real-time operating system from Microware Systems
Corp. (Des Moines, Iowa) - version 2.2, which supports Java. It uses
Project X's microkernel, along with its own graphics APIs and development
tools, to run Project X-enabled games or other interactive applications.
The hardware and network flexibility of Blackbird lets consumer OEMs
build a variety of products around it, potentially including digital terrestrial
TV sets, cable and satellite set-tops, Web-browsing TV set-tops, DVD
players and game machines.
By using the Project X media processor across virtually all Blackbird
configurations, Motorola is paving a route to a unified base of games and
interactive applications for the system. Applications can be delivered via a
network or digital video disk.
Motorola has already forged several deals with key software and service
providers. Spyglass Inc. (Naperville, Ill.) recently won a multimillion-dollar
contract to provide Web-browsing client and sever technologies and
consulting services to Motorola for the Blackbird platform. UniView
Technologies Corp., a Dallas-based developer of hardware and network
technologies for set-top applications, has agreed to port its Xpressway
Internet service to the Blackbird environment, and will market the resulting
integrated system to companies seeking end-to-end communication and
entertainment solutions.
The Blackbird platform stems from the mid-'90s, when Motorola,
Microware and a forerunner of VM Labs jointly bid on a request for
proposals (RFP) issued by Tele-TV. That ambitious interactive TV joint
venture - now defunct - comprised Bell Atlantic, Nynex and Pacific
Telesis. Industry sources close to Motorola said the whole NIM concept
for the Blackbird platform came from the Tele-TV RFP.
While telco video-on-demand plans started to go south in late 1996,
Motorola never abandoned its ambition to become a premier supplier of
system solutions to consumer OEMs.
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