APIs for set tops.........................
October 27, 1997, Issue: 977
Section: News
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API effort seeks to stave off Windows threat -- Consumer firms ally on digital interface
By Junko Yoshida
Tokyo - The quest for a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for digital consumer entertainment products has spawned an uneasy alliance among six leading Japanese and European consumer-electronics companies. While it remains fuzzy on the particulars, the group is determined to fend off challenges from the American-led PC industry, which has intensified its efforts to invade the consumer space with products based on Microsoft's Window CE operating system.
High-level executives from the six companies, which sources identified as Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Philips N.V. and Thomson Multimedia, came here to plot strategies earlier this month at the Japan Electronics Show. But Minoru Morio, executive deputy president and chief technology officer at Sony, acknowledged that the companies have been holding informal discussions on the API issue since midyear.
The attempt at collaboration emerges at a critical juncture for consumer-electronics vendors, each of which has pursued its own digital consumer platforms based on its favorite real-time operating system and 32-bit CPU. In many cases, the RTOS and CPU of choice are proprietary to the platform developer.
Failure to reach consensus on an interface, the six realized, might thwart applications portability-the hallmark of the Wintel platform from which the PC vendors have mounted their campaign for dominance of the digital living room. Standardized APIs will let the consumer companies offer the connectivity, flexibility and convenience of PC-based alternatives without forcing them to tie their products to Windows CE or Microsoft's Win32 APIs.
"We do recognize that computer companies are also making efforts to streamline their products, in order to penetrate the consumer market," said Morio. But "is Windows CE an operating system suitable for the home market? Some may prefer Windows CE, but we don't see it as an ideal solution" for consumer products.
"We all agree," Morio added, that the PC is become more like a home-entertainment system and the TV is becoming more PC-like.
"But that doesn't mean the emergence of a TV/PC market," he said. "People don't watch TV on a PC, and they won't do PC tasks on a TV."
So the consumer companies intend to craft a more consumer-market-friendly approach for allowing applications fluency among the potential Babel of digital consumer platforms.
The consumer giants have indeed tended to look inward for building materials when designing their appliances. Sony has settled on a 32-bit MIPS-based digital platform running Aperios (formally known as Apertos), its distributed RTOS (see story, below). Matsushita has ported its home-grown iTRON-based RTOS to a proprietary 32-bit, non-RISC CPU. Toshiba plans to use a MIPS processor for digital audio/video and an RTOS from an unidentified third party. Hitachi is reportedly promoting its own iTRON-based RTOS running on its SH processor.
The goal of the six-way alliance, Morio said, is to ensure application portability "while allowing maximum freedom for system vendors to pick their own browsers, embedded operating systems and CPUs."
According to Shin Fukuda, general manager of the consumer-products development group at Matsushita's AVC Products Development Laboratory (Osaka, Japan), the alliance has divided its task between two working groups. One is focusing on standardization of broadcast APIs for interactive data and entertainment services, and the other on API standardization for such peripheral products as TVs, DVD equipment, set-tops, VCRs, printers and cameras, all connected via a common bus such as IEEE1394.
But while the six companies have agreed on the overall mission, the devil will be in the details. A fundamental unresolved issue is the API level the group hopes to standardize. Some members hope to see standardization on a scripting-language level using MHEG or Java; others envision far more straightforward API agreement at the software-application level.
And some with proprietary RTOSes believe API standardization won't prove meaningful unless the alliance works toward a common middleware layer that would sit closer to the operating system.
Further, sources noted that it won't be easy to agree on new APIs when some companies have already built products based on their own programming interfaces. That holds particularly true for broadcast APIs. "How to maintain compatibility with some of the existing interactive broadcast services" may prove the most nettlesome sticking point, Sony's Morio said.
Shinichi Makino, chief technology executive of the Video and Electronics Media Group at Toshiba (Tokyo), would neither confirm nor deny that his company is an alliance member. But he asserted that the only way to standardize broadcast APIs is "to slug it out on the market."
Numerous contestants
Existing broadcast APIs include those created for OpenTV-a Thomson/Sun Microsystems joint venture-and used by Europe's Canal Plus; DVX, promoted by Matsushita for DirecTV services in Japan; MHEG and Java APIs being worked on by the Digital Audio-Visual Council (Davic); and IT Vision, which Toshiba is heavily promoting here for interactive data services using vertical blanking intervals. A subset of IT Vision will also be used by NBC in the United States starting this fall.
The most likely outcome of the alliance's work, Matsushita's Fukuda speculated, will be not a single set of APIs for consumer products but three: one for Japan, one for Europe and one for the United States. Europe's Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) group plans to discuss broadcast API issues at its December meeting. The representatives of the six consumer companies that met here earlier this month agreed to wait and see how that meeting pans out before making a decision on broadcast APIs. The hope, Fukuda said, is that DVB "will adopt an open API, possibly free, that would not bind us to specific platforms."
The group realizes it must resolve the issues quickly or risk missing the window of opportunity to fend off Microsoft. "I worry that all we are doing here may end up being a tempest in a teapot," said Fukuda. "For example, if Microsoft could somehow find a back door to convince a certain broadcaster to use its APIs for datacasting and make it as a de facto standard in the United States, what choice would we have? Would we be shut out ofthe market, or . . . go alongwith them?"
Consumer companies appear loath to consider the latter option. So far, none of the Japanese companies has openly committed to Windows CE for use in products other than the handhelds for which the OS was originally written.
"If consumer-electronics system vendors really want to [provide for] fundamental innovation in their systems, they must be able to leverage their own operating systems," said Akikazu Takeuchi, president of Sony's Architecture Laboratories (Tokyo). "Otherwise, they have no other option but to depend on RTOS vendors to make changes in their operating systems within a short period of time."
But Sony appears to be by far the most aggressive among the Japanese vendors in its commitment to its own RTOS (Aperios). Other companies seem somewhat reluctant to go up against the rest of the world with proprietary software and hardware.
Matsushita's DirecTV set-top is its first consumer system to run the upgraded iTRON RTOS on its proprietary, non-RISC 32-bit CPU. Fukuda repeatedly stressed last week that while his company is betting on that combination, it has also prepared for the possibility that market circumstances will prohibit Matsushita from pursuing its proprietary solution.
Nonetheless, Matsushita's Panasonic unit appears to have bet big on its parent's unannounced 32-bit CPU. According to Panasonic sources in the United States, Matsushita has three processor families, of 8 to 32 bits, that all share an upwardly compatible instruction set. The 32-bit version, the sources said, has the very high code density of the short-instruction formats used in the 8-bit and 16-bit machines, plus full 32-bit operation, a C-friendly programming model plus enhancements for multimedia, including a coprocessor bus.
Matsushita has ported iTRON as well as the ATI Nucleus+ real-time kernel to the processors, sources said.
-Additional reporting by Ron Wilson.
Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc.
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