To: Michael Olds who wrote (43215 ) 7/19/1999 10:05:00 PM From: John Rieman Respond to of 50808
An interview with Ma Cable.................................cedmagazine.com TCI's plant is ready for digital. Only 30%.....................Our digital video strategy is to continue to deploy boxes as rapidly as we can, going for 1.85 to 2 million subscribing households at the end of this year. We'll also move into deployment of DCT-5000+ hardware. We have assurances we'll receive 100,000 or more "5000s" this year. CED: Regarding the HFC upgrades and two-way activation, where did you finish last year and what are your plans going forward? Werner: We finished last year at 30 percent. Going forward, we'll spend $700 million this year in plant only (which does not include modems, telephony gear or set-tops). It's part of a three-year project to spend $2.5 billion for upgrades. DCT-5000......................................CED: Moving to digital video, you've deployed millions of digital set-tops, but none that are "interactive." When does that occur? Werner: This is a complicated project-daily there are problems with some pieces of silicon talking to others. But even with all the problems, I'm reasonably confident we will have hardware (DCT-5000 set-tops from GI) in reasonable volume by the end of this year. What about Java and WinCE????........................CED: How would you characterize the Sun/Microsoft situation, where elements of the Windows operating system have to be married to Java? Werner: Obviously, getting any software to work together is always difficult, so you've got several different approaches. You can go to a single software company to get to market quickly, but it puts one company in large control of the platform. Or you can open the box and use different layers of software. We've taken the second approach. It doesn't mean that Microsoft can't write integrated applications, but we've been very careful to make sure the software platform is open and it supports other companies writing applications. My belief is we'll get them married and we'll see a variety of methods by which we come to market. We think Microsoft is a wonderful company with huge strengths, but we won't design a closed network at any level. Microsoft has agreed to publish all the APIs associated with this. The pilot cities (which include Denver, Dallas, Portland, St. Louis and others) will primarily use a Microsoft stack, but other cities will be opened up. We'll also be doing one that is based on Microsoft in the set-top stack and someone else in the servers. GI has a take back clause!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!As for our digital video service, we're deploying as fast as we can. There's such a huge appetite for digital video that we're putting DCT-2000s out fast. We have exchange rights on a number of the boxes as they come in, to exchange for 5000s.