Philips and Canal Plus are C-Cube partners in the MediaOne deployment.................................
eet.com
Next-generation set-tops still missing critical middleware
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(05/05/00, 4:17 p.m. EST)
SAN MATEO, Calif. ? At Cable2k, this year's annual convention of the National Cable Television Association, which starts Sunday (May 7) in New Orleans, cable operators will find many of the things they want for enabling interactive services, but not the one thing they really need: a set of open application program interfaces ? middleware ? for advanced digital cable set-tops.
Home networking, hard-disk drives for personal video recording, Java and MPEG-4 are among the enabling technologies that will be in evidence on the show floor. But without standardized middleware, interoperability among set-tops and interactive services remains an empty promise.
That means a protracted "integration nightmare" for suppliers of boxes and software, said Jean-Marc Racine, chief executive officer of Canal+/U.S. Technologies (Cupertino, Calif.), a set-top middleware provider.
The U.S. cable industry has been working on the API issue for three years within CableLabs' OpenCable initiative. But none of the players, including CableLabs itself, is willing to predict when the industry may coalesce around an open API.
Don Dulchinos, vice president of advanced platform and services at CableLabs, said the members "have a pretty clear idea what we want" from standardized middleware, now that due diligence has been completed on the responses to last fall's request for proposals. "It seems clear that a lot of answers we have been seeking are out in those proposals," he said.
The dilemma is how to blend them into a coherent open standard. "We want to get this done as soon as we can," Dulchinos said.
But the pursuit of divergent goals by different service providers complicates the quest, said Jos Swillens, president of set-top boxes at Philips Digital Networks (Sunnyvale, Calif.). Conflicting agendas have fragmented the U.S. cable industry as operators have been acquired by companies in other core businesses that have sought to leverage regulatory changes and technology convergence. AT&T, for example, took over TeleCommunications Inc. primarily to enter the local-phone business on TCI's wires, and America Online is acquiring Time Warner largely for access to the latter's high-speed Internet pipes.
Range of issues
The divergent strategies have raised the level of the API debate beyond such basic issues as whether set-tops should support Java Script alone or a full set of Java TV APIs. "A whole range of service and application issues [has been] set forth by different operators," said Swillens. And without a common middleware layer, it's unclear whether system vendors could design a set-top that could meet the requirements of both AT&T and AOL, for example.
Those working on the standard must still decide on a presentation engine, such as HTML; an execution environment that allows set-tops to run various applications; a common set of TV APIs; and software download mechanisms. "This goes far beyond the Java vs. ATVEF fight," said Alan Yates, director of TV platform marketing at Microsoft Corp.
Yates' comment referred to a longstanding disagreement over software standards for digital TV broadcast. One camp is pushing the development of TV-plus-data applications through the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF), an initiative led by Intel Corp. and Microsoft. The opposition is promoting Java-based interactive digital TV applications supported by Sun Microsystems Inc. and consumer electronics manufacturers.
The open middleware framers are also grappling with how to handle software upgrades and how applications might support additional set-top peripherals, said Philips' Swillens. A user who wants to connect a video camera to his set-top to send video e-mail, for example, couldn't do so unless the API supported the peripheral application.
"The industry can choose to allow some room for the software industry to innovate, or they can specify very tight specifications" so that any application can run on any platform, Yates said. "It's a very hard issue."
But in responding to the OpenCable middleware RFP and in answering questions from CableLabs, Yates said, "We've seen the cable industry sorting through absolutely all the right issues. We think they're spending the right amount of time and are coming to conclusions with just the right balance to allow the software industry to make significant innovations."
European model
OpenCable appears to be leaning toward the model of Europe's Digital Video Broadcast (DVB)-developed Java-based Multimedia Home Platform. An MHP-like "Java combined with HTML approach" is a natural choice, said Canal+'s Racine, since "the competition is truly global" among service and technology providers.
With that in mind, vendors are pursuing CPU- and operating system-independent set-tops. Scientific-Atlanta, in addition to its series of PowerTV-enabled boxes, has an advanced set-top that uses dual processors (Sparc and Hitachi's SH4) to run dual operating systems (PowerTV and the Windows CE-based MicrosoftTV, respectively). And advanced set-tops from Motorola/General Instrument run not only the Vertex OS, which GI has used for a long time, but also Liberate's software platform and MicrosoftTV.
Further advancements are promised with a point-of-deployment (POD) module, a conditional access system that embeds the specifics of the cable box for portability. OpenCable describes the POD as separable from the set-top, to allow interchangeable systems that consumers could purchase from retail channels.
Some technology providers even suggest as long as a proprietary platform has a good hardware abstraction layer, much of the hardware portability envisioned by cable operators is already possible.
But CableLabs' Dulchinos disagreed. "The goal for OpenCable is both the portability of services and the portability of hardware," he said. Well-designed hardware abstraction layers and CPU and OS independence alone don't "get us where we want to go. We need to go beyond what's available today. We want to expand our interoperable services."
That work continues on several fronts. Philips, for example, is promoting MPEG-4-based interactive content creation. "While ATVEF can bring static links to Web pages," Swillens said, MPEG-4's object-based encoding, graphics and animation support, and enhanced scalability allow the design of "dynamic links" to such streaming video-based applications as media portals. MPEG-4 can bring more video-centric applications to the Internet, Swillens said.
Canal+, meanwhile, is readying a high-end architecture, called the Media Web Box, that can synchronize HTML pages with video content. |
