Tug-of-war delays OpenCable software spec
eetimes.com
By Junko Yoshida and George Leopold
EE Times
(06/11/99, 6:21 p.m. EDT)
CHICAGO — The cable industry is expected to attend the National Cable
Television Association convention June 13-16 in Chicago with a commitment
to deliver OpenCable specifications for retail-ready advanced digital set-tops
by the FCC's July 2000 deadline. But protracted foot-dragging in defining the
application programming interfaces (APIs) needed to guarantee the
interoperability of set-tops based on disparate operating systems could
forestall the arrival of interactive services.
The impediment to progress on the API front, sources said, has been the
behind-the-scenes tug-of-war between Microsoft Corp. and Sun
Microsystems Inc. as each has sought to promote its own software in the
television space.
"It's been a long, hard road to define software specifications that would meet
our OS-agnostic and CPU-agnostic principles," said Richard Green, chief
executive officer of CableLabs Inc. (Louisville, Colo.). Acknowledging the
"competing factions in the computer industry [that are] trying to define the
software issues," Green warned that "any decision of this magnitude has to
be made carefully, and it takes a lot of discussion."
Nonetheless, he noted that the discussions are not taking place solely
between the computer software factions. "CTOs and CEOs of leading cable
operators are actively engaged in the debate," Green said.
Richard Prodan, chief technology officer of the industry's CableLabs
consortium, told regulators last month that the software aspects of the
OpenCable spec are a "high priority" and should be completed this year.
Others in the PC and consumer-electronics industries, however, speculated
that it may take another year or longer to sort out the middleware issue.
Meanwhile, the cable industry's business priorities, and thus its expectations
for OpenCable-compatible digital set-tops, have dramatically shifted in the
past year. Originally projected as the killer spec for an advanced digital
set-top that would fully leverage the two-way cable infrastructure, the
current specification dictates nothing more than a baseline box with an
electronic programming guide for digital pay-per-view.
Retailers who hope to sell digital set-tops said that the OpenCable spec falls
short of their expectations. "It really only encompasses basic functionality,"
said Alan McCullough, president and chief executive officer of Circuit City
Stores Inc. (Richmond, Va.). What retailers want, McCullough said, is
"competitive functionality."
For now the OpenCable spec makes no mention of the other interactive
features that were expected to be part of the two-way digital cable business.
Those include Web surfing, e-mail, interactive shopping, gaming, auxiliary
datacasts and downloading of executable applications. Indeed, the two years
of discussions that have ensued since OpenCable's 1997 launch have left the
industry "right back where it started — defining what interactivity means and
what it needs to do," said James Bonan, vice president of new-business
development for the Consumer Audio/Video Products Group of Sony
Electronics Inc. (Park Ridge, N.J.).
As the industry reassesses its definition of interactive TV, a concept called
voice-via-cable is being touted as the wave of the future by cable's newest
titan: AT&T. AT&T chairman C. Michael Armstrong "has been clear about
what AT&T plans to do with all its subscribers: sell them local, long-distance
and international telephone service along with Internet access on the side,"
said Gerry Kaufhold, principal analyst for the Cahners In-Stat Group
(Scottsdale, Ariz.). "AT&T has gone after the nationwide cable-TV
operators with concentrated subscriber bases that lend themselves to
AT&T's plan." he said. "These deals offer AT&T mass volume by providing
lots of subscribers, packed with density."
Kaufhold acknowledged that the approach guarantees incremental new
revenue for local telephone service. However, "it's hardly visionary," he
added.
The POD race
While system and chip vendors may have to wait a year or two to tap new
growth markets for advanced digital set-tops, an opportunity could be opening
up now for so-called point-of-deployment modules. The POD module
specified by the OpenCable spec is based on a PCMCIA card with an
embedded conditional-access system. Those systems are specific to each
cable operator, involving elements that the companies won't share with other
operators and don't want consumers to own.
By making the POD module a separable unit from the set-top, cable boxes
could, in theory, become interchangeable systems that could be sold in the
retail channel.
The cable industry recently agreed to add DES encryption to POD modules
to secure the unprotected interface between the POD and set-top, according
to CableLabs' Green. Signals to which conditional access would be decrypted
inside the POD would be protected via DES when transmitting to the set-top.
CableLabs will carry out interoperability tests for POD modules at the end of
July, Green said. "Six POD manufacturers — some of them are traditional
set-top vendors; others are new ones — are expected to show up."
It is far from clear, however, whether the retail business model will prove
attractive to consumer-electronics companies and set-top vendors,
particularly if the set-tops in question are baseline models.
Sony, for one, had aggressively promoted its home-grown Aperios OS for
cable set-tops but today maintains a far lower profile.
"We had said that we were prepared to enable the third-party box vendors to
use Aperios and to [let them] license our home-network module
technologies" based on the Home Audio-Video interoperability (HAVi)
architecture, Bonan said. "But we have no specific plans at this point to
launch Aperios-based cable set-tops in the United States."
For consumer-electronics companies that build terrestrial digital-TV, satellite,
cable and Internet devices, the concerns go beyond how to build OpenCable
compatibility into a TV set. They are also concerned about maintaining the
integrity of devices based on disparate platforms.
The API debate has split the industry into two factions. One is pursuing Java
Virtual Machine-based interoperability for such devices as advanced digital
set-tops and terrestrial digital TVs; the other group hopes to achieve
interoperability through a common content spec across cable, satellite,
terrestrial and Internet transmissions.
The Java group is represented by Sun Microsystems, a few cable operators
and a host of consumer-electronics companies under the Advanced
Television Systems Committee (ATSC)'s DTV Application Software
Environment (DASE) group. The group is hammering out key elements now
for a common Java TV API for cable and terrestrial TV.
The competing group is led by the proponents of the Advanced Television
Enhancement Forum (ATVEF), which was founded by Intel Corp.,
Microsoft and a number of media companies.
For key industry players participating in both OpenCable and DASE, the crux
of the issue is the scalability of interactive data services. Depending on the
complexity of the programming and execution environments designed for TV
data broadcasting, the emerging datacast spec could profoundly affect
next-generation TV receiver and set-top architectures. Consumer-electronics
companies don't want an implementation that would be fit to a giant PC
footprint.
The ATVEF group, for its part, believes the dominant issue is the content
specification rather than the platform spec. Tom McMahon, director of
advanced television technology at Microsoft's Consumer Platforms Division,
testified last month at an FCC-sponsored DTV-cable roundtable that "there is
an opportunity here for a common content specification that would free
content providers and allow the industry to move ahead."
It is unclear whether the camps can meld their world views. One source
familiar with DASE said this past week that while the group "may come up
with a draft to meet its June 30 deadline, it is not a standard yet. We are
looking at next year [for that]."
Meanwhile, the ATVEF group is aggressively proceeding with its de facto
approach, collecting a variety of commercially available software
technologies and plugging them into its framework. Wink Communications,
for example, recently announced an agreement with Microsoft to promote
interactive content and commerce based on ATVEF-compliant devices.
More worrisome than the API battle itself for some players is Microsoft's
apparent emergence as a force to be reckoned with in the cable industry, via
a deal with AT&T that has the telecom giant committed to deploying up to 10
million Windows CE-based cable set-tops over five years.
"Microsoft will be allowed to provide Windows-oriented equipment to
AT&T's headends," said Kaufhold of Cahners In-Stat. That means Microsoft
may be "able to add some features to head-end equipment that will require a
Windows CE set-top box, or they won't work."
Laurie Priddy, senior vice president for advanced technology at AT&T
Broadband and Internet Services, insisted that her company's deal with
Microsoft will "absolutely not" affect the industry's debate on OpenCable
middleware issues. "The focus on middleware allows each cable operator or
consumer-electronics company to choose its own OS," she said.
For now, nobody appears willing to sacrifice that flexibility.
"It's no secret that Microsoft would be extremely happy to just have the
cable industry standardize on a Microsoft product road map for all cable
set-top boxes," Kaufhold said, but "it's also no secret that major cable-TV
operators are very paranoid about letting Microsoft control anything."
Alan Yates, marketing director for Microsoft's WebTV unit, said Microsoft
continues to work with the cable industry on the OpenCable standards. Yates
said CableLabs has been influential in refining and promoting the ATVEF
content specification initially developed by Microsoft. ATVEF will usher in
an open standard for creating interactive television content on all networks,
Yates added.
Kaufhold speculated that "eventually, we'll see a series of API
recommendations, and any operating system that becomes successful will
need to be able to work with the APIs that are currently in vogue."
The FCC is pressing cable and consumer-electronics companies to work out
further digital-TV/cable compatibility issues. FCC chairman William Kennard
has directed the industries to present a compatibility time line by July 1. |
