REAL Blackbird news...........missed this yesterday (06/04/98; 7:56 p.m. ET)
Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector is quietly creating a new business structure and partnerships within its consumer systems group with an eye toward launching a closely guarded digital entertainment platform this year code-named Blackbird.
Without revealing details of the architecture, Jim Reinhart, Motorola's director of operations for media processing and platforms, recently acknowledged that Blackbird is Motorola's answer to the trend toward increasingly flexible, programmable platforms for a variety of digital consumer products. "I believe in trends, and the trend now in the industry is more flexibility," Reinhart said.
Motorola's efforts diverge from the traditional chip vendors' approach, built around reference designs based on their newest chip sets. Instead, the company is going out of its way to reach key application developers, interactive content publishers, and service providers before unveiling the full architecture to system OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Further, Motorola (company profile) says it will enter the system business itself, when necessary, manufacturing Blackbird set-tops and motherboards.
Described as an advanced, "soft" set-top platform connected to a high-performance network, Blackbird will be equipped with an operating system, its own set of APIs, and a media processor. According to
Reinhart, Motorola has settled on a device "jointly developed with VM Labs."
That 3-year-old start-up, based in Los Altos, Calif., recently unveiled an interactive game platform called "Project X." Motorola, named as a silicon partner for VM Labs, has a nonexclusive license to build Project X semiconductors and systems, Reinhart said.
VM Labs is also working with Toshiba and Thomson Consumer Electronics, which are committed to launch DVD players and other digital consumer systems using Project X technology next year.
If Project X is one leg in the Blackbird strategy, a second partnership looks likely to provide another key infrastructure technology: easy-to-use, TV-centric Internet application and connectivity service packages. UniView Technologies, a Dallas developer of hardware and network technologies for set-top applications, will port its Xpressway Internet service to the Blackbird environment and market the resulting integrated system to companies seeking end-to-end communication and entertainment solutions.
According to Reinhart, Motorola's goal is not to sell an integrated chip set to system OEMs as a point solution, but to provide "enough context" to attract consumer-electronics OEMs to the platform. Describing Blackbird as "an exciting technology that requires a long
lead time," Reinhart said that "at this stage, we are taking both active and proactive approaches to make sure that the Blackbird environment can offer enough software and applications" for system vendors to exploit.
In describing the partnership with uniView, Motorola said it will manufacture Blackbird set-top systems for uniView development and will provide motherboards and OEM system-design kits to support uniView's
software and service licensing.
Asked about getting into the systems business, Reinhart stressed that such a move would not be unusual for the Semiconductor Products Sector. Motorola's computer group has been successful in the business of making modules and systems for a long time, he noted. By building partnerships and an infrastructure to support the platform, Motorola is "taking a pragmatic and moderately conservative approach," said Reinhart.
Motorola's attempt to launch a versatile digital consumer platform comes as other leading forces in the consumer and PC industries jockey for position in this developing market. Potential platform competitors include Sega's Windows CE-based game systems, which are heavily funded by Microsoft, as well as other yet-to-be-defined set-top PCs that are expected to incorporate a DVD player by 1999.
VM Labs is making a splash in this arena with its highly parallel media processor -- said to be capable of executing in excess of 1.5 billion instructions per second -- along with APIs and development tools. "Project X is designed to turn consumer systems, such as standalone DVD players and set-tops, into an interactive entertainment platform" by equipping them to double as game consoles, said Richard Miller, president and CEO of VM Labs.
Miller, who founded VM Labs in 1995, is a veteran in the game console industry, serving as Atari Computer's R&D vice president when Atari introduced its 64-bit Jaguar system late in 1993. Motorola was a foundry for the Jaguar chip set, and, Reinhart said, the company's relationship with Miller dates from the Atari days.
Reinhart acknowledged that Motorola has known VM Labs since "the startup's founding -- early [on] Day 1." Indeed, Motorola has contributed working capital through an undisclosed sum of minority equity investment.
Asked about what kind of role Motorola has played or whether it holds any intellectual property in Project X or the VM Labs' media processor, the company declined to comment.
Reinhart made it clear, however, that Project X and Blackbird are not one and the same, though they may share the same technology to an extent. "I would call Blackbird a superset of Project X," he said. |
