Excerpt from the last article:
In July, TV / COM announced it had landed its first contract in wireless cable,
technically called Multi-channel, Multi-point Distribution Service, or MMDS. The
company will provide digital set-top boxes to SkyCable Inc. of Canada, delivery
scheduled to begin in October.
"They're a good company ... just first-rate," Dataquest's Cassell said.
But however respected TV / COM may be with industry insiders, it's not a household
name, nor, for that matter, is General Instrument. So to switch from selling set-top boxes
to cable companies to direct consumer marketing, these companies will have to hook up
with a well-known consumer electronics company such as Sony or RCA.
"They're trying to realign themselves and become more and more brand-and
retail-oriented," Cassell said of the competitors.
TV / COM has already started that realignment, said Merritt Doyle, the company's
executive director of marketing and business development. In May, the company teamed
up with Grundig to make digital television set-top boxes for the British television market.
TV / COM will supply the design, but the boxes will be sold under the Grundig name.
These boxes will receive digital signals over the air.
In the United States, TV / COM is taking part in industry attempts to hammer out a
standard for the digital set-top cable boxes to be sold beginning in the year 2000. The
so-called "Open Cable" standard now under development will provide a common design
specification that any manufacturer can use, Doyle said, giving consumers the benefit of
price competition. When people move anywhere in the United States, they'll be able to
use their old box on their new cable system.
The boxes will likely use two competing varieties of software. One is the Java
programming language from Sun Microsystems, and the other is Microsoft's Windows
CE operating system. Local cable operators will decide which to use, Doyle said.
While the hardware sets the technical limits of what the box can do, the software
determines its capabilities, said Digital Broadcast's Palumbo.
Both flavors of software can be modified or upgraded by the cable operators to provide
new features, Palumbo said, such as the ability to make financial transactions. Internet
features such as e-mail and Web browsing will be standard.
From the consumer's point of view, the best thing about these new digital cable boxes
will be their ability to fold together all these previously separate functions into one
easy-to-use system, running through the high bandwidth of a cable connection. Web TV
and other attempts to graft the Internet onto a television will seem crude by comparison.
Presumably, Palumbo said, the viewers won't have to worry about the software problems
that bedevil computer users -- or get bored waiting for the information or entertainment
they want to travel down the skinny "cocktail-straw" pipes of telephone lines.
In other words, the technology will become invisible to consumers, Palumbo said. They
won't need to know what's inside these new set-top boxes any more than they need to
know what's inside their television.
"The thing that's interesting and so exciting is that the Internet is by definition database
navigation and communications-driven," Palumbo said.
"Combine that with television's much more robust capacity, and you can do a lot with it.
It presents a very compelling proposition, with new areas of business that companies can
explore." |
