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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DiViT who wrote (46477)	10/22/1999 7:34:00 PM
From: Maya	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

Come on DiViT, we know that Sony is having problems with their encoders. I wouldn't bet on them.

To: DiViT who wrote (46477)	10/23/1999 10:01:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

C-Cube's talking encoders inside cable settops............ cableworld.com Chips Will Make Interactivity Go By Jim Barthold Those worried about Y2K know chips make everything go. This includes interactive television systems. There are chips in the headends and the boxes and, if the manufacturers and operators succeed, there will be fewer chips that do more. "One of the things existing boxes have is chips," understated Tim Lindenfelser, marketing VP for Broadcom Corp., which supplies the majority of the industry's silicon. Primarily, high-end interactive boxes have a video chip for the MPEG stream and a data chip to run the DOCSIS cable modem. "What we're going to do is integrate those two together. You'll have a dual QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) solution with a DOCSIS MAC (Media Access Card) integrated into a single chip," Lindenfelser predicted. Cable interactivity offers lucrative new chip opportunities. "The market is going to be quite big and I don't think a shake-out will happen any time soon because the market's evolving very fast," said Kishore Manghnani, marketing VP at TeraLogic Inc. Interactivity can deliver four subscriber elements - choice, convenience, control and connectivity - all of which require a downstream silicon investment of about $25, with an extra $10 thrown in for reverse channel considerations, Manghnani said. "The subscriber can subsidize another $10," he sniffed. "The revenue potential from these services is so tremendous that an extra $10 is nothing." Maybe not to end users or operators who are subsidized by e-commerce partners like banks and retailers, but it's a lot when chip makers add up the quantities and explains why big names like Intel Corp. are moving into cable's space. "Intel's been involved with this type of Internet or broadcasting data across the network for a while, in the lab and R&D and we've had several different technologies that delivered some of this same type of capability," noted Greg Lang, VP/GM of Intel's network interface division. That attention includes Intel's acquisition of Stanford Telecom Inc.'s component products division from Newbridge Networks Corp. "Stanford Telecom will be a key piece of what we will do in the cable space," he predicted. "You should expect us to deliver standards-based products in the future." Chip-makers also need to seamlessly blend video and Web content on TV screens. Untouched Web graphics don't make it on a TV screen. Chips are needed to fix that, said Lindenfelser. "One of the things you need for interactivity is a high quality graphics capability in the (set-top) box itself so you can display the stuff on a TV screen and have it look as good as a PC," he said. Broadcom, he noted, is taking this into the third dimension. "You want it to look like the animations that occur on Monday Night Football," he said. "Going forward from 2D to 3D is going to make the experience even more rewarding and (you can) start to have even richer browsers and applications where you can have three dimensional animations taking place on the screen that have a lifelike look to them." Graphics, agreed Brian Johnson, C-Cube Microsystems Inc.'s VP-advanced development, are crucial and C-Cube has "had pretty advanced graphics all along." Now, he said, C-Cube is taking its chips in yet another direction by putting an MPEG encoder into the set-top box itself, rather than in the headend. "If it was a digital-only system you might not need that, but all the cable systems today are hybrid analog/digital and people don't want to be confused," he said. Instead, he said, consumers want to seamlessly perform the same functions, whether watching analog or digital video streams. "To do the same thing on the analog channels, I think, is imperative," he said, and requires putting some analog content into a digital format, thus the MPEG encoder. (October 25, 1999)