Two articles courtesy of Jim Mulis:
PC industry learns its TV lesson
November 20, 1997
ZDNet News via Individual Inc. : LAS VEGAS -- The PC industry has learned its lesson as it seeks to muscle into the living rooms of America and beyond: Don't mess with people's TVs.
Computer companies such as WebTV Networks Inc. continue to experiment with how to merge the TV with the computer and the Internet.
But after some costly lessons, the message is now as clear as the image on a high-definition TV -- the television set rules family entertainment, and the PC will just learn how to fit in.
"Don't try to fix TV -- it's fine as it is. Just enhance it," said Bow Rodgers, chief operating officer of Power TV, said Monday.
The latest offerings from several PC-TV/Web TV companies shown at the
Comdex 97 trade show now in progress raise rabbit ears on that point.
The best known of the Internet TV hybrids, Microsoft owned Web TV Networks, will over the next week ship WebTV Plus, a new version of the software now found in about 200,000 homes. The company predicts it will have more than 1 million users next year.
One reason for the growth: WebTV has learned to enhance the TV portion of its name. When users boot up the new product, they are instantly greeted with a TV show (instead of a computer menu display), but a show surrounded by a Web-like interface. The product allows TV viewers to see show schedules, plot summaries, and to read movie reviews.
The company is also working with show developers on "enhanced TV," which allows viewers to click on their screen for additional information -- for instance, a star's bio or a football player's average yards per carry.
"We think the TV crossover link will take over the TV world," said Phil Goldman, co-founder of the Palo Alto, Calif., company.
Even computers themselves will have to become more TV-like to convince consumers to get at least some of their video entertainment from the PC. Computer screens produce much sharper images than TVs, but their display of motion in video is often choppy -- unacceptably so for someone expecting a TV- like experience.
So S3 Inc., a maker of graphic accelerator chips and supporting technology, this week promised at Comdex that it will deliver technology that will dramatically improve the color and picture quality of video on a PC by the second half of next year.
By the end of 1999, the technology will be so cheap, it will be part of mainstream PCs and other processor-based devices, said Dado Banatao, chairman of S3, based in Santa Clara, Calif.
While some companies try to make the computer more like a TV, Rodgers' Power V is attempting the opposite by creating specialized operating software and chips in TVs and set-top boxes.
Cable companies are under pressure to enhance the TV viewing experience, said Rodgers, because subscription rates are flattening. If they can't attract more customers, he said, they'll have to get more money from current customers. And the way to do that is to offer them compelling interactive services accessed by the TV.
"TV is going to be the entertainment and information hub in the household, " he said.
The idea that PCs must be more like TVs is new territory for computer and cable companies. Many millions of dollars were dropped pursuing the idea that just adding computing capabilities to a TV would convince consumers to open their wallets to play online games, bank by wire, or order pizza with the click of a TV remote control.
And when the Internet hit, those same companies scrambled to weave the Web into a TV screen. "They thought just putting the Web on TV was what the consumer wanted," said Tim Bajarin, president of consultant Creative Strategies in an Jose, Calif.
The companies appeared Monday at a Comdex panel on PC TV.
Cable Facing Difficult Choices For Set-Tops
November 20, 1997
Inter@ctive Week via Individual Inc. : The cable industry, in its search for a common approach to next-generation set- top boxes, faces a stiffer challenge than it did in developing data modem standards, largely because it is dealing with a diverse range of compelling options that offer very different approaches to creating future services.
Making matters more complicated, the spate of separate discussions
reportedly under way between Microsoft Corp. on the one hand and a
number of cable operators, including Cox Communications,
Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), Time Warner Cable and U S West Media
Group on the other, left uncertain whether business deals would supersede a purely technical consideration of the options. The OpenCable Task Force, under direction from the executive committee of Cable Television Laboratories Inc. board, has put the decision-making process on a "fast track," in hopes of seeing standard-compliant boxes in the market by sometime next year, but the deal-making combined with the technical complications of sorting through all the options suggested the track might be slower than many would like.
Hints of the potential for conflict within the industry over the ultimate specifications were in the air at press time as the focus of talk about a possible second deal between Microsoft and a major cable company shifted from TCI (www.tci.com) to other cable operators. Microsoft's first foray into cable was a $1 billion investment in Comcast Corp. Under the deal that was being discussed with TCI, sources say Microsoft would agree to license its Windows CE operating system and to invest up to $1 billion in TCI set-top boxes in exchange for winning an endorsement of an architecture that would give developers using Windows-related tools a tremendous leg up in competing for business in the digital TV arena.
Similar deals were reported to be under study by the other cable companies mentioned here as was a possible deal involving Time Warner and U S West in a high-speed networking enterprise that would compete with @Home Network (www.home.net). Sources say the drawback to any such pacts where OpenCable is concerned is that, despite the openness and interoperability ensured in the licensing process, the industry would be making a devil's bargain that gave Microsoft a de facto domination, given the head-start developers using its tools would have over others.
"The whole point of OpenCable is that the industry learned from previous experience that it can't build its future on closed, proprietary systems," says Tom Wolzein, analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Inc. On the other hand, the important thing in any deal with Microsoft is that the industry needs "box money from someplace," he says. "It's a lot sexier from Wall Street's point of view if that money comes from the computer industry than from the banks."
Moreover, some players saw the TCI/Microsoft deal as a potential threat to the industry's traditional suppliers, especially if the deal involved Microsoft's use of off-shore third parties to meet low-cost hardware requirements.
"I don't think that would be an issue in any deal involving TCI and
Microsoft," says Lou Kerner, an analyst for Goldman Sachs Group LP. "
The cable manufacturers have the modulation, encryption and other
technology these boxes need as well as the manufacturing ties, which
Microsoft doesn't. "
But, true as that is, says an unnamed Wall Street source, any deal bringing Microsoft into the manufacturing and procurement picture poses dangers for cable's traditional suppliers, given the difficulty of protecting their interests in any contract that might be written between TCI and Microsoft. "There's a house of cards in all of this that begins to look extremely fragile, no matter what you have on paper," the source says. "If the cards fall, guess who's left standing?"
Such concerns could ultimately derail a pact between U S West Media or any of the other cable companies and Microsoft as well, but if that deal goes forward, it could pose a major challenge to the search for consensus within the OpenCable process. The more technicians look at the issues, the less inclined many are to sign off on a Windows approach.
"I don't think there's all that much of an issue when it comes to things like choosing Microsoft's browser over Netscape [Communications Corp.'s]," says Wilt Hildenbrand, vice president of engineering and technology at Cablevision Systems Corp. (www.cablevision.com) "They both pretty much do the same things." (Cablevision is continuing to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer with its new Optimum Online data service on the heels of shifting to a high-speed data affiliation with @Home Network (www.home.net), which operates in a software environment tied to Netscape's browser and
other products.)
Heed The Network
But, Hildenbrand suggests, there are major differences that need to be looked at when it comes to structuring the distributed network architecture that will allow content developers to mix data feeds into TV programming to create new types of on-demand and interactive content.
"My concern in the formative stages of the [OpenCable] process is that we're being a little too box-centric as opposed to network-centric," he says.
"The whole magic of this industry is the network we're building and the performance we're building into it in the context of all the advances we're seeing in network computing," Hildenbrand says. "In an environment that's too box-centric, you set a benchmark with finite imbedded parameters and then risk running out of those finite resources as an infinite array of new content starts coming into the marketplace."
Cablevision, working with what was then AT&T Network Systems, moved
a ways down the network-centric path in preparing to launch on-demand
services three years ago, but was sidetracked after AT&T Network Systems became Lucent Technologies Inc. and lost its ardor for interactive television. Now Cablevision is providing video-on-demand services using set-top boxes supplied by NextLevel Systems Inc. (www.nlvl.com) in a limited commercial rollout now passing several hundred Long Island, N.Y., households.
One vendor moving aggressively to convince the cable industry that a
network- centric approach is the right one is OpenTV Inc. (www.opentv.com), the joint venture between Sun Microsystems Inc. and
Thomson Multimedia that has taken the lead in supplying interactive TV functionality to cable and satellite interests in Europe. Along with deals making OpenTV the middleware for distribution of interactive programming by News Corp's U.K. satellite service British Sky Broadcasting and by the French satellite venture Television Par Satellite, OpenTV has been chosen as the platform by the leading cable operators of six European countries.
"People in Europe are rolling out digital TV today with a need for set-top boxes that are low-cost but have the functionality to support a wide range of services beyond those initially offered," says Jan Steenkamp, OpenTV's CEO. "The emphasis is on doing things that are feasible and have demonstrable market demand at affordable prices without trying to accommodate future service ideas that have no financial backing or demonstrated market demand."
Even with these limits on future proofing, the "ultra thin client" processing capability within the OpenTV-compatible set-tops, now licensed for production by a dozen manufacturers, poses a higher cost penalty than the market is willing to pay at this point, Steenkamp notes. "Operating companies are employing a variety of mechanisms in their deals with suppliers to get costs down as much as possible, but they're still looking for the magic number where the perceived value of the services matches the costs."
With these cost realities in mind, OpenTV hopes to persuade the U.S. cable industry to rethink its approach to the interactive future by building on the OpenTV middleware design and working with the firm to develop new Applications Program Interfaces (APIs) that would support introduction of more advanced services in the future without requiring a changeout of boxes to higher processing capabilities.
"We believe we can develop the hooks necessary to evolving to higher
functionality without any cost impact on the existing platform," Steenkamp says, noting that OpenTV meets the OpenCable requirement of being interoperable with all operating systems that run the set-top processors.
The OpenTV approach avoids the PC model, where juggling files
interactively is the key to functionality, applying instead the broadcast distribution model of cable and satellite to minimize the level of processing required at the set-top. In this store-and-forward model, the client grabs information transmitted with the TV fare, stores it temporarily and supports direct access to and manipulation of the information by the user. The system also supports dedicated distribution (point-to-point) when the application
requires a significant use of bandwidth during a session with a targeted user, as is the case with a movie delivered on demand, but the programming guide interface that gets the user to that movie resides in the network broadcast feed, not in the client.
Whether or not one chooses to be as client-thin and network-centric as OpenTV, there is good reason to rethink any commitment to a Windows CE approach in light of the amount of processing the latter scheme necessarily adds to the set-top, says Bow Rodgers, chief operating officer of PowerTV Inc. (www.powertv.com).
"I think they still have a long way to go to make CE work well with the set-top box," Rodgers says, noting that the Microsoft operating system (OS) was originally designed to handle many functionalities that have nothing to do with the TV set.
Other Options
PowerTV, which responded to the OpenCable RFP as part of a group that
includes IBM Corp., Pioneer New Media Technologies Inc., PowerTV,
Scientific-Atlanta Inc., Sun and Toshiba Corp., has developed an OS strictly for the set-top that makes use of APIs tied to JavaScript and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to minimize processing requirements and to ensure interoperability across various development platforms. "This is the way you get to something that is TV- rather than PC-centric," Rodgers says.
Dynamic HTML, the next-generation version of the language that supports hyperlinking in the World Wide Web domain, when used in conjunction with Sun- developed JavaScript, provides cable programmers a standardized means of adding text and instruction components to the TV channel at the headend or at the original source, thereby ensuring interoperability with the PowerTV OS while minimizing the amount of processing required at the set-top to accomplish the chosen functionality.
This functionality, Rodgers explains, is further enhanced by PowerTV's specially designed graphics rendering Application Specific Integrated Circuits, known as the "Eagle Chip," which serves to translate Internet graphics into displays compatible with North American TV standards and to generate displays in sync with programming or with the icon selections made by viewers.
The Sun (www.sun.com) presence in the OpenTV and PowerTV alliances
points to the role of that company's software in fueling the OpenCable agenda, notwithstanding the fact that most parties to the discussion view Sun's Java language as requiring too much client processing to be of use in the interactive TV domain. In the case of OpenTV, Sun has supplied a Java-like but less code- intensive virtual engine that resides at the client to perform translation between the OS and applications. In PowerTV's case, Sun's JavaScript offers a highly compact group of simple instruction sets that can be applied to enable a broad range of functions.
"If you want to find the root cause for the unraveling of the TCI-Microsoft deal, look at Sun and the versatility they've already shown in coming up with uses of their coding techniques to serve many interests," says the OpenCable source quoted earlier. "The message to the cable industry is the ramp-up to getting where you want to go isn't all that long if you decide to pass on Bill Gates' offer."
The industry's OpenCable task force came away from a first round of
reviewing responses to its RFP in Denver last month with a sense that the basic architectural road map guiding selection of the crucial APIs and the processing domain for the underlying OSes would be in place in time for the industry's Western Show convention in early December.
"I think there's a widely shared expectation that they'll be able to announce they've gotten to this point, and I don't think the solution will come from a single company," PowerTV's Rodgers says.
But, with Microsoft still wheeling and dealing in cable, the prospects remain strong that, whatever the road map turns out to describe, the pieces are likely to be readily compatible with content developed on the software giant's platform without requiring a whole lot of processing power to accommodate a virtual engine. The compromise that would allow this to happen while avoiding all-out dependence on CE-based architecture, would use Dynamic HTML interoperability between application and OS. This reduces the range
of potential applications because of the inherent programming limitations of HTML.
Even when JavaScript is used to enhance the functionality range for HTML, the resulting applications paradigm falls short of supporting some of the most promising applications. For example, Rodgers notes, multiplayer "twitch action" games aren't doable on the PowerTV platform, although the system will support slower action multiplayer games and other community environments. |
