Saturday 12th September
Four play for global digital set-top market
French pay-TV channel Canal+, Pioneer Electric Corporation, C-Cube Microsystems and its subsidiary DiviCom have formed a strategic partnership to create an end-to-end interoperable digital system solution for the global DTV market.
The four parties have agreed to develop a solution from the interface with legacy billing systems, to the subscriber user interface on the digital set-top terminal.
This will use a DVB-MHP (Multiple Home Platform) compliant set-top box in Europe and an OpenCable compliant solution in the North American market. The share of responsibilities within the alliance will see Canal+ and Pioneer handling system integration and software application development, while Pioneer takes on the the manufacturing of digital set-top boxes for the European, US and Japanese markets.
C-Cube's contribution will be an evaluation board that includes an integrated MPEG-2 audio and video decoder, high performance graphics co-processor, and a host CPU for the development of an OpenCable compliant set-top box.
Canal+, the senior partner of the three, will supply its Mediaguard conditional access system and its Mediahighway middleware technology, which can already be found in most set-top boxes installed in European homes, as well as the software applications for the new platform. These and device layer software can be downloaded for the acceptance of any upgrade.
Jean Fran‡ois Jezequel (left), general manager of marketing and sales at Canal+ Technologies, says: "The idea is that Canal+ technologies like Mediaguard are already proven in the European market, but we want to expand and the natural market to do this in is the US."
This is why it selected Pioneer, which will help Canal+ hit its new target market early next year. However, the company has gown impatient with the DVB Project over ratification of the MHP standard. "We want to get it quickly," adds Jezequel.
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