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

To: Ian deSouza who wrote (32196)	4/15/1998 4:08:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Canal Plus(C-Cube customer), the biggest in Europe................. herring.com Le set-top box While Canal+'s fundamental business is cable programming and content development, it also pursues other markets like multimedia and set-top boxes. The company's multimedia division began publishing CD-ROMs in 1995 with moderate success and plans to develop up to eight new titles annually. Canal+ officials recently said the company would spend more than $15 million on multimedia efforts this year. It also announced an agreement with America Online, the German media company Bertelsmann, and the French telecommunications services provider Cegetel to offer Internet services in France. Under the agreement (which needs regulatory blessing), Canal+ and Cegetel are acquiring a majority stake in AOL's French operations, gaining access to 200,000 subscribers in the nascent French Internet market, where a measly 2 percent of the population is currently connected. (Cegetel's majority owner, Compagnie G‚n‚rale des Eaux--a water utility that recently transformed itself into one of France's dominant media companies--announced in March that it would acquire media concern Havas, which holds a 34.4 percent stake in Canal+.) But Canal+'s most impressive efforts may be in the development of set-top-box technologies. Working with Bertelsmann and a team of more than 200 engineers, the company began designing its own set-top box for satellite TV service in 1991. In April 1996 Canal+ was the first European cable operator to offer digital TV over satellite. Called Mediasat, the Canal+ set-top box includes a smart-card slot (the smart card bears the subscriber's digital identity and acts as a key), a credit card slot (for transactions), and a serial port for connection to a PC (for software downloads and Internet connection over satellite). To complement Mediasat's capabilities, Canal+ is introducing a variety of interactive programming, ranging from basic services like a weather channel that features local conditions to more complex programming like video games and an employment channel that allows viewers to search job listings. To date, nine electronics manufacturers, including Philips, Sony, Pioneer, and Samsung, are building the Mediasat box. Nokia, Matsushita, and Toshiba are currently in negotiations. "Our goal is to have as many vendors as possible develop on the common standard we have developed," Mr. Berger says. He adds that the box costs about $250 to manufacture, but he expects the price to decrease. As with most set-top boxes, Mediasat is rented to subscribers rather than sold outright. The digital satellite service, called Canalsatellite Numerique, has more than 800,000 subscribers in France. Although the service is majority owned by Canal+, the U.S. cable giant Time Warner also has a 10 percent stake. Canal+ is hoping that other cable providers will license its technology to create a standard broadcasting platform in Europe. To that end, Canal+ recently announced a licensing deal with the cable operator British Digital Broadcasting. But another standard, called OpenTV, developed through the joint efforts of Thomson Multimedia and Sun Microsystems, is also vying for dominance. This platform is being championed by Rupert Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting and by Canal+'s biggest French competitor in the digital satellite market, T‚l‚vision par Satellite (TPS). TPS, backed in part by France Telecom, made a splashy entrance into the digital satellite market in late 1996, gaining subscribers at an impressive rate. However, despite its early inroads, the company trails Canal+, with only 360,000 digital subscribers. Rumors persist in the French media that the two companies will eventually merge.