Those 1M settops that Pioneer has on order are Pegasus boxes.........
Just for review. The Power Alliance,only one MPEG vendor......................
powertv.com
Looking to extend the advanced TV standards further, PowerTV organized and currently chairs the Partners In Open Wideband Engineering Resources (POWER) Alliance, an open, cross-industry consortium dedicated to fostering open standards for the emerging Interactive TV marketplace. Founded by PowerTV in 1995, the POWER Alliance currently has eight members representing leaders in ITV-related hardware and software, semiconductor products, operating systems, and authoring/programming tools. Other POWER Alliance members are Argonaut Technologies, Ltd.; C-Cube Microsystems, Inc.; Scala, Inc.; Scientific-Atlanta, Inc.; Software Development Systems, Inc.; Sybase, Inc.; Oracle Corporation; and 3DLabs, Inc.
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Argonaut was rumured to be working on MPEG-2 decoding on their Risc processor, but Pegasus moved to the MicroSpac platform............
tagish.co.uk
UK company develops ARC Risc microprocessor core
Publication Date: 06/11/96
Synopsis: UK company Argonaut Technology Labs are developing its ARC Risc microprocessor core in response to positive feedback from potential customers. Rick Lucas of Argonaut says that vendors and Asic houses are "crying out" for ARC, partly because it can reduce costs by 20 percent. The development of ARC-based Asics is facilitated by setting up of alliances with EDA tool vendors.
Argonaut moved into the microprocessor market only this year, having made its name as a 3D games developer. Further software developments are rumoured to include MPEG-2 decompression code. The company feels that with these three core technologies, it will be in a position to address new markets such as set-top boxes and DVD.
ARC is a 32-bit microprocessor which differs from Advanced Risc Machines (ARM) in its ability to be customised. The company supplies synthesisable VHDL code which can be modified by the user, helping to reduce the size and complexity of the core.
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Original Source: Electronics Weekly. WWW: electronicsweekly.co.uk
Oh yea, back to the post............................
mediacentral.com
S-A Strategy Pays Off In Digital Orders
By Jim Barthold
A five-year-old strategy is paying dividends for Scientific-Atlanta Inc. today.
S-A last week said that Tele-Communications Inc. has now joined its growing list of customers with orders for a "substantial number" of Explorer 2000 digital boxes and interactive network technology and would start deploying product in Salt Lake City before the end of this year.
This puts TCI in the ranks of Comcast Corp., which announced its third digital market, Charleston, S.C., and Cox Communications Inc., which expanded its S-A markets to Oklahoma City, Phoenix and San Diego. At the same time, long-time S-A supporter Time Warner Cable said it would expand deployment "to a significant number of major cable systems by year-end."
"When you add all this up, what we really have is a commitment from about 50 major sites. On average, they have 275,000-homes passed per site, and, on average, 200,000 subscribers. Those 50 sites have a footprint of about 10 million customers," said James McDonald, S-A's president-CEO.
McDonald drew a direct correlation between the spate of orders and the company's long-time strategy to develop interactive networks.
"The real critical issue is that we pursued a strategy to bypass the broadcast model and to go to the interactive model five years ago," he pointed out. "It now looks like that turned out to be, strategically, the right decision. We think we're being validated by the marketplace."
TCI, the last major MSO holdout in adopting the Explorer 2000, has ordered as many as 11 million digital set-tops from General Instrument Corp., which last year announced industry-wide orders of about 16 million next-generation units. The high-end model DCT-5000s are expected to begin production by the end of this year. McDonald, however, cast some doubt on that time schedule.
"We know it took us five years to do this. I wish them luck," he said.
The S-A interactive technology, honed through trials that included, most notably, Time Warner's Full Service Network in Orlando, taught the company about the complexity of an interactive digital network, McDonald said.
"The operating system, the security system, the applications and the integration, it really takes all those things if you're going to deploy a system," he explained.
The new orders are a major reason why S-A also said last week it was doubling its digital manufacturing capacity at its Juarez, Mexico, plant. That increased capability, McDonald said, will help the company enter the retail market when interoperable boxes, built to specifications developed through CableLabs' OpenCable initiative, hit the stores.
"When you take apart the retail channels and look at them, there are about six different ways to reach the consumer. I think there's a variety of those that will be used," said McDonald, dismissing concerns that S-A's brand recognition will not be high in a retail marketplace expected to include consumer electronics names like Sony, Panasonic and Pioneer.
"I think what's important is that we're in development of what's called the point-of-departure module ... which allows people's boxes to be hung on these networks," he continued. "Deploying these interactive networks is a very important thing because that's where all the products will be hung on later. All the brains will be in the network so for TVs to get the intelligence out of the network, they have to interface with the networks we're shipping."
Those networks, McDonald emphasized, incorporate details such as training MSO personnel and providing "multipoint-to-multipoint" security to ensure the safety of the burgeoning electronic commerce sector.
"We spent five years doing this," he emphasized, "and I think what people are realizing is that if you want to deploy this stuff in 1998, we're the only ones who can supply it."
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