Jeff, Bill Gates has said that CUBE's DVxplore chip has the potential to significantly reduce the price of DVD recordable products. In the past, MPEG-2 codecs cost thousands of dollars, pricing DVD recordable out of the consumer marketplace. Cube's chip will cost significantly less than $100. The difference between PC versions and consumer versions reside primarily in the chip interface - the guts of the chip are the same for both applications.
See what Bill Gates had to say about CUBE's DVD recordable technology at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in March 1998 (He explicitly mentioned CUBE's codec technology as far more advanced and inexpensive than he had imagined was possible in the current time frame). I highlighted the key info in bold type:
MR. GATES: I'm certainly surprised to see that C-CUBE is getting that chip out and getting it out at very low price points. So this is one capability that's going to actually appear faster than we would have expected.
microsoft.com
Excerpts from Gates' speech:
<<An area of storage, DVD, is a huge advance, allowing us to have the capacity now to deal with
digital video. At first, this will just be plain back digital video, but, as we'll discuss today, we're
going to move on to scenarios where the user gets to manipulate the digital video, as well.>>
<<SNIP>>
<<A final form factor is the intelligent TV, and there's no doubt that this will be using PC
technology--PC processors, PC graphics and video. The only thing that is not necessary, of
course, is a new display or a local storage device when you've got the high-speed, two-way
connection.
Web TV is a very great start there, because we've brought some of the ease of use and
benefits of integration to that TV-watching experience, particularly with the Web TV Plus that
we brought out last fall. You'll be able to think of Web TV as simply a very low-end PC. It
doesn't run all the applications, but it gives you the Internet access, and then at retail you'll
have a family of products going out to the very high-end PC itself.
One of the big challenges is making sure that all of these things work very, very well together,
and the industry, particularly Microsoft, has a lot still to do here. We've put together a video
that captures what it's like today to put these devices together, so let's take a look at that.
[Videotape spoofs ease of use of TV and Web devices together.]>>
<<SNIP>>
<<Now, one of the scenarios we tackled in Windows 98 is digital television. We include in the
programming guides and the ability to download that by using a broadcast TV schedule. Here
there are some really neat things that can be done, and it's a step towards what we call digital
television.
"Digital television" refers to not only having higher quality video, but also having the
interactivity, having to access more information.
So let's go ahead and take a look at this. The broadcasting format that we're starting with is
called HD 0, and that includes not only today's interleaf formats, but a high-resolution
progressive format, either 480 P60 or 720 P24, and that lets you do movies at very high quality,
and it's quite impressive what that looks like.
This is what we want to have built into every PC, and we've been working with the TV
equipment industry and the broadcasters to explain why, no matter what format the production
work is done in, actually transmitting in progressive is a very good approach, because it's the
most efficient way of using the spectrum, and that means whether it's for multiple channels or
the data enhancement, you've got extra capability there that can be used.
So let me ask Steve Guggenheimer, who's the product manager helping drive these capabilities,
to come on out and show us what digital TV looks like.
MR. GUGGENHEIMER: Come on over. Have a seat--a chance to relax.
As you mentioned, digital television has about three key features, and we think that in order to
make digital television a reality in the near term, we have to do two things. We have to enable
a high volume of reasonably priced receivers so that consumers go out and buy the receiving
capability, and we need to offer some form of business model or business opportunity for the
entire television industry-- broadcasters, cable, et cetera--so they can recover the cost of
moving to a visual infrastructure.
So on the PC side, we're all very familiar with information access, so I brought along the other
two things. It does the high-definition or the HD0 capability, as well as interactive
programming.
Now, this particular PC has the hardware in it right now, and is receiving, decoding, and
displaying a 480 P or an HD0 level signal, and it's the PC that's now outputting into this TV as
well as the normal screen.
The hardware for this is something that's actually going to come up in the next year. In fact,
ATI [a CUBE partner] has said that we can announce this morning that within the next six months, they plan to
try to put on their mainstream graphics chip the ability to receive and decode the HD0
capability so that mainstream PCs within the PC '99 timeframe will have the hardware capable
of supporting this level of video so consumers can get that.
In terms of the software, I'm running this particular machine on NT 4.0. We're running the same
thing next door on Windows 98, and we're even adding capability into Windows CE so that we
can offer consumers a range of receivers, going all the way from the set-top box form factor all
the way up to the work station form factor. So in terms of enabling a high volume of receivers,
this type of capability will be available on a large number of receivers of all form factors within
the next year.
Now, let's talk a little bit about interactivity. You'll notice in the lower left-hand corner, I have
an I. So as a consumer, if I wanted, I can simply ignore it, or, if I'm interested, I can go ahead
and bring up the tool box.
So now what I can do is I can take the broad reach medium of television and combine it with
direct interactivity of the Internet. So now as a consumer, if I want statistics, I can simply
click on statistics, and they come up when I want them, versus the broadcaster sending them
to me before every commercial.
Going back to the toolbar, another interesting model is replay. So as a consumer now, if I want
a replay, I can get the replay once, I can watch it over and over again, I can come back to it
later in the game. And if you think about it, that requires storage, another common component
of the PCs that we're all familiar with.
Now, in both of these areas, you'll notice that there was advertising associated with this, so in
terms of a business opportunity, there's the opportunity for more or new forms of advertising,
and that's very familiar to broadcasters.
However, in addition, there's other things. For example, transactions. In this case, I could buy
a jersey associated with this game. Or, if you were watching a television ad, you could be
watching an ad for CD-ROM and go all the way from watching it to purchasing it. So it gives
both the broadcasters and the advertisers and the community the opportunity to move from
just a push media all to a full medium or to transactions.
The last on I want to show you in terms of being a little bit creative. You talk a little bit about
potentially having multi-channels. Well, what about a subscription program that says the
television program, the football game is free, but for an extra 50 cents a month, I can get a
second camera angle. This has enough bandwidth to support two complete pictures. I could get
the one camera angle for free and then for an extra 50 cents get a second camera angle, or I
could get the local commentator instead of the national commentator.
So what I wanted to show and what we've done is basically that we will be enabling digital TV
capabilities on a broad range of receivers, ranging from the PCs down to set-top boxes over the
next year and, as you can see, it's quite a nice thing, and I'll go ahead and just hit B to
demonstrate. It's on the PC.
MR. GATES: What we saw there was watching high-definition video and being able to interact
with it. Another scenario that we think is very important is actually letting people create their
own high-quality video--to be able to do editing right there on the PC. So in the same way that
we see still photos and keeping albums of those, mailing them around--we see that as being
popular--we'd also like to bring in a motion video.
Well, there's a very tricky element here, which is that motion video requires very high data
rates and in order to deal with it at all, you have to have real-time compression, real-time
encoding into one of these compressed formats, and that hasn't been possible in the past. In
fact, it's only been with very, very expensive workstations that people have been able to do
that.
Now, through the miracle of technology, we can see that that can become a future of the PC,
so real-time digital recording. I'd ask Peter Biddle to come out and show us how this is going to
work, how we're going to get video in as a first-class data type.
MR. BIDDLE: Thanks a lot.
Okay. What I have here for a demo is I have a Toshiba laptop and it's in a docking station, and
inside the docking station is this new chip from C-CUBE--it's an MPEG 2 encoder/decoder chip,
and plugged into that chip, we have an actual video feed from one of the cameras back there.
We also have a Pioneer DVR drive connected to this system.
And what I actually just did is when you were over there on the couch, I took a feed from that
video camera, and we should be able to see this come up on screen. So what you're seeing on
the screen is MPEG 2 data that we real-time encoded using this chip onto the hard drive
without playing it back, and this happens real-time.
MR. GATES: We're even adding capability in the Windows CE.
MR. BIDDLE: In the audio.
MR. GATES: Yes.
MR. BIDDLE: Okay. So not only can this chip encode, it can also decode, and it can decode
two simultaneous streams. That has some sort of immediate ramification for end users, that the
first one we want to demo is playback with two streams at the same time. And here we go.
So what we're seeing right here is that video once again, but I'm going to add "Michael Collins"
from Warner Brothers. We're going to stick that in the mix. And, as I said, because we're doing
two streams at the same time on the system, we can start doing per pixel transitions between
the two, so you're going to see here is a set of programmable phase wipes and other transitions
that are only capable if you're capable of doing two streams at the exact same time. We're not
switching sources, we're actually decoding both streams simultaneously.
And this also has interesting sort of repercussion with picture-in-picture, where HDTV has, you
know, very immediate benefits there, as does single-click recoding in an electronic programming
guide on like a Web TV or a broadcast PC. You could go away for the weekend and stack up all
your shows and digitally record them.
A system with this level of functionality would have cost about $100,000 a year ago,
probably well over that, and this is going to debut at consumer price points, but what's
really interesting is that we also have a DVR drive on the system.
So just to review, we took the signal, we MPEG 2 video encoded it, we MPEG 2 stereo audio
encoded it, we put it down on the hard drive. Then I ran a program that turned it into DVD
video format, and then we copied it down. So I'm going to pop the DVR into the system here.
So you can see this disk right here, here it is. And, as I said, we went from end to end here,
and let's take a look at what happens. This is a consumer DVD video player, so we take the
disk, we put it into the consumer DVD video player, and here's an act of faith. So what did we
just do? In four minutes, we went from nothing, analog capture, MPEG 2, onto the hard drive,
turned it into DVD video and burned it on a DVDR disk, put in a DVD video player and played it
back.
MR. GATES: I'm certainly surprised to see that C-CUBE is getting that chip out and getting it
out at very low price points. So this is one capability that's going to actually appear faster than
we would have expected.>>
Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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