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S-A'S DIGITAL RALLY
Touts Set-Top Orders from Seven MSOs
By LESLIE ELLIS
Scientific-Atlanta Inc. still wants to be a contender in the digital set-top drama, and it rebounded last week with orders from seven North American cable operators.
The takers for S-A's Explorer 2000 digital set-tops were Adelphia Communications Corp., Cox Communications Inc., Marcus Cable and MediaOne in the United States, as well as Canadian operators Rogers Cablesystems Ltd., Videotron Ltee. and Cogeco Cable Inc.
S-A declined to discuss order specifics, saying only that its combined order load for its Explorer 2000 digital, two-way set-top now sits at 850,000 units. That number includes the 550,000 digital boxes previously ordered by Time Warner Cable and a still-unspecified amount from Comcast Corp.
After subtracting Time Warner's previously announced order, the seven operators -- none of which would publicly discuss their specific S-A order levels -- will divvy up a remainder of 300,000 set-tops.
Tom Rhinelander, an analyst with the Yankee Group, characterized S-A's news as a tactic to say, "Hey, look at me: I'm still relevant."
That's because S-A's rival, NextLevel Systems Inc. (soon to become General Instrument Corp.), grabbed headlines over the last month with 15 million digital units ordered by a large MSO consortium, while partnering with consumer-electronics giant Sony Electronics Corp.
"I think it's mainly a response to what's been going on with GI -- S-A is saying, `Don't forget us. We can't be specific right now, but we're doing something different here,'" Rhinelander said.
What's different is S-A's aggressive time-to-market shipment schedule, which begins this summer. NextLevel's boxes, by contrast, aren't due to hit the streets en masse until sometime next year.
Bob Van Orden, director of digital product marketing for S-A, said last week that the orders, while cloaked in terms of quantity, "show that we have nine MSOs, which serve 33 million subscribers, in 25 major metro areas."
That's proof that "the notion that one party walked away with the market is not true," he added.
Patti Reali, an analyst with the Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group, said the decision by seven MSOs to buy S-A boxes, despite the heft of the order, "goes back to the fact that nobody wants to put all of their orders in one basket, which is GI's -- the industry got burned before by doing that."
At press time, several MSO executives who signed up for Explorer set-tops were not available for comment on order quantities or strategy.
Time Warner will lead the charge in its Austin, Texas, system, according to MSO sources there.
Dave Wood, a corporate spokesman for MediaOne, said he couldn't get specific about order quantities "because it's my understanding that the number hasn't been worked out yet."
Other MSO executives said in an S-A statement that they like S-A's gear because it is a fully two-way device, and it doesn't include a telephone-return line to handle upstream communications from customers.
James Rigas, executive vice president of strategic planning for Adelphia, said in the statement that the MSO expects high demand from customers for new digital channels, Internet access and other new services.
"After a few months of offering digital channels, we plan to introduce two-way interactive services, such as e-mail and Web browsing, by this summer," he added.
That work will start this year in Adelphia's Buffalo, N.Y., system cluster.
The Canadian operators, which together serve 4.8 million customers, said the Explorer boxes will be installed in Toronto, Montreal and Burlington-Oakville, Ontario, starting in the second quarter.
Comcast will start deployments in its Baltimore system, and Marcus in Glendale, Calif.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Birmingham, Ala. Cox and MediaOne said they'd announce digital-video-launch locations later.
S-A's Explorer 2000 set-tops will comply with OpenCable specifications, Van Orden said, and they already support Internet protocol, HTML (hypertext markup language) and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s JavaScript software.
Under the chassis, the Explorer box includes a 54 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) microprocessor, 4 megabytes of D-RAM (dynamic random-access memory), 2 MB of memory for graphics and MPEG-2 video decoding, 2 MB of ROM (read-only memory) and 1 MB of flash memory, Van Orden said.
PowerTV Inc.'s graphics engine and operating system rides atop that, although an add-on board is available to support alternative operating systems, he said.
Also last week, Cable Television Laboratories Inc. officially contracted S-A as the systems integrator for the ongoing OpenCable effort. In the agreement, S-A is charged with producing and documenting a "network-architecture reference model," and with identifying scenarios for billing, customer use and third-party applications. S-A will also help to define key interfaces.
In other words, said one vendor executive who is tracking OpenCable developments, S-A will "be the watchdog" to ensure that OpenCable does indeed remain an interoperable, multivendor platform. Even though Tele-Communications Inc. issued and ordered off of its own OpenCable specification in December, key interfaces still need technical description, the executive said. |
