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

To: Maya who wrote (28722)	1/25/1998 7:54:00 PM
From: CPAMarty	Respond to of 50808

There is alot of information at this site cir-inc.com here is a sample; The TV settop box is the device at the residence that interacts with the video server in an interactive television system. The next generation of settops have built in to them a higher level of functionality, enabling interactivity and video-on-demand. In an interactive network the settop terminal becomes an intelligent network element and is in constant communication with the other network elements and the operations systems software. An important factor that will shape the emerging settop market is pricing. The advanced settops that are currently being proposed or are being adopted in trials are complex pieces of electronics and potentially very costly. As currently envisioned, the fully-fledged settop box for the New Television could cost many hundreds of dollars to produce. The consensus in the industry, however, is that once boxes go over $300-350, they may be hard to justify economically. However, this problem may be overcome through rentals. There is also some reason to question the consensus in that consumers have shown a readiness to go out and spend well over $1,000 in premises equipment to access the New Television through a satellite dish. The growing understanding of the power of the settop has lead to a belief that whoever controls the settop will control the New Television market. This belief has led in turn to calls from both the industry and from regulators for future settop boxes to be open architecture platforms. In addition to building these systems with a technology that would permit such openness, some would like to see settops available through independent electronic retailers, much as telephones are. However, the cable industry has always been quite reluctant to see this happen. Openness means a lot more than just an open market for settops. Rather it implies an open architecture similar to that found in the personal computer industry. In such an architecture the software and chips that go to make up the settop would essentially be in the public domain allowing third party software developers to thrive and to provide interconnection from various information providers and service providers. The open architecture concept may also be extended to the complete New Television distribution system, so that service providers can buy one piece of equipment from one vendor, marry it with a piece of equipment from another vendor and then have a total solution that works. In the cable television industry the pieces of equipment that need to be so married are settop, servers, transmission equipment and (possibly) switches.