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To: DiViT who wrote (34737)	7/28/1998 1:32:00 PM
From: Raymund W	Respond to of 50808

Zenith sure is doing well for a company that is "bankrupt." See the Zenith - One and Only thread for more on this... Ray

To: DiViT who wrote (34737)	7/28/1998 4:09:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Sun aims workstations at the digital-TV world By Alexander Wolfe and George Leopold PALO ALTO, Calif. - A new frontier for workstation designers is opening up, as the engineering pacesetters of the field look to Hollywood as an emerging market with limitless potential. High-end workstations fitted with graphics accelerators are being snapped up by creators of digital content for television and for Hollywood. Heating up activity is the impending shift from analog TV to high-definition television (HDTV) and to the standard-resolution digital format known as SDTV. (Domestic digital broadcasts are scheduled to begin in November.) All workstations, regardless of processor or operating system, are in the picture. Indeed, Silicon Graphics and Intergraph Corp. have long targeted this market. (IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq have also made some forays - though not as broad - into the broadcast and animation worlds.) Now, they're being joined by a new and potent competitor in the form of Sun Microsystems Inc. "This is a totally new market for Sun," said Sam Turcotte, marketing manager for entertainment technology at Sun. The company launched its thrust at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in April in Las Vegas and reintensified its efforts last month at Siggraph '98 in Orlando, Fla. At Siggraph, Sun corralled several technology partners with expertise in HDTV and MPEG-2 to put on an impressive display of workstation-based solutions. Digital Video Systems GmbH (Hannover, Germany), for example, showed a complete HDTV post-production system comprising its own ProntoVision digital-disk recorder and Sun's Enterprise 450 server. The recorder streamed 120 Mbytes/second of uncompressed HDTV video to a RAID disk array. Also on display were digital-editing offerings from Media-Ware Solutions (Canberra, Australia). Running on Sun workstations, the editors allow MPEG-2 video streams to be edited and spliced together in real-time. A key selling point, said David Keightley, managing director of MediaWare, is an on-screen software interface that mimics the front panel of standard editing hardware used in TV and post-production studios. Unlike computer users, TV engineers don't like to use a mouse, Keightley noted. That's just one of the cultural differences coming to light as the more buttoned-down workstation crowd begins to interface with pony-tailed Hollywood types. "The two worlds are beginning to come closer together," said Keightley. Along with its workstation and server technologies, Sun wants to thrust Java into the entertainment world. Paving this path are Sun's Java 3-D and Java Media Interfaces, which the company hopes developers will use to create animation- and editing-related apps. The timing for Sun's media foray looks good. The digital-content-creation market is in the midst of a boom as movies add ambitious, computer-created special effects and as cable- and broadcast-TV operations begin the long conversion cycle from analog to digital production equipment. Indeed, according to a recent inside industry estimate, the total entertainment market in 1998 could be worth as much as $2.46 billion. More........... eet.com

To: DiViT who wrote (34737)	7/28/1998 4:42:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 50808

Top companies team up for PC-TV, etc......... Media, tech firms think digital By Jim Davis Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM July 28, 1998, 12:35 p.m. PT Some of the most influential media and technology companies are collaborating to create the technological underpinnings for a coming wave of TVs that will combine standard programming with Internet content, and Microsoft appears to be just one of many small fish in a big pond. Media companies including Disney, CNN, and NBC have teamed up with Intel, Microsoft, CableLabs, and others to work on harmonizing technology for combining Internet content with television programming, according to a joint announcement made today. The companies have formed an organization, called Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATEF), which will promote the use of standardized technology, allowing content providers to design interactive content for delivery through cable, satellite, or digital TV platforms. Due to the market's relative immaturity and lack of strong consumer interest, the oft-cited convergence of PC technologies with consumer electronics devices is far from being fully realized, but the group's work could pave the way for everything from handheld video players to digital set-top boxes to finally arrive en masse. More........... news.com