Tony,
This Blackbird is absolutely awesome! The wave of special purpose
"crippled pcs" is soon to come. I bow down to the Project Leader
and development engineers of this secret project. This one is a beauty. Didn't B. Gates predict the demise of Motorola's involvement in the PowerPC a couple of years ago?!?
Any idea of what Intel's offering will be in the set-top box market??
sorry just caught this post by Paul on the StrongARM post 64807
Message 5756551
MOTOROLA'S BLACKBIRD
multichannel.com
Broadband Week for September 14, 1998:
Motorola Enters Set-Top Fray With Top-of-Line Digital Box
By LESLIE ELLIS
A top-secret project from deep inside Motorola Inc. is set to come out from the cone of
silence this week, when the manufacturer will use a trade show in Amsterdam,
Netherlands, to debut an aggressively priced set-top box with high-end features.
Quietly in the works for two years under the code name "Blackbird," referring to a
reconnaissance aircraft, the set-top platform will emerge from Motorola's Consumer
Systems Group in Austin, Texas -- where its semiconductor chips are usually designed.
Motorola executives described the set-top as both a reference-design motherboard and
a turnkey private-label option for other consumer-electronics makers. The company will
officially unveil the device at the IBC show in Amsterdam this week, and it will be
shown to North American MSOs at the Western Show later this year, executives said
during a telephone briefing last week.
"Our plan is to establish this architecture as a key element in the world's interactive
broadband-multimedia infrastructure," said Ray Burgess, vice president and assistant
general manager of the Motorola division.
He described the new box as "a combination of a broadband router, a network
computer and a digital home-theater platform, all rolled into one consumer package that
costs inherently no more than any of the standard digital set-tops."
The estimated cost range, depending on feature sets and order size: between $300 and
$600, Burgess said, adding, "We'll be ready to go with a consumer-deployable product,
in volume production, in the fourth quarter."
The Blackbird box had its early roots in Bell Atlantic Corp.'s now-defunct "Unity"
set-top design, Burgess said. When that project aborted, Motorola went underground,
gathered a group of silicon experts and came up with a way to cram as many features as
possible into a set-top, while keeping costs low.
Cable operators, while intrigued, were still skeptical last week.
One senior MSO engineering executive who was familiar with Motorola's plans called
Blackbird "technologically interesting," but the executive added, "We do not want to be
locked into such an application-specific platform," referring to the game environment.
As for Motorola's cost projections, the MSO executive said, "What we really need is a
digital box that costs no more than our present advanced-analog boxes."
Motorola's first crack at a digital set-top will come loaded with interactive features, 3-D
graphics, MPEG-2 digital video, high-fidelity audio, high-speed Internet access,
electronic commerce, support for the Java software language and broadband
networking -- on one chip, Burgess said.
Under the eggshell-colored chassis are two key components: a PowerPC chip and a
"ProjectX Media Architecture," described as a high-end software-programmable
platform that handles multimedia streams.
Motorola worked with California-based VM Labs on the ProjectX architecture,
Burgess said, describing it as a way to decode MPEG-2 digital-video and AC-3
digital-audio streams, while handling advanced graphics and networked games.
Because of its internal modularity, the Blackbird boxes are "network-independent,"
meaning that they will run on cable's hybrid fiber-coaxial networks, telcos' ATM
(asynchronous transfer mode) networks or Internet-protocol networks, he said.
Those design elements -- coupled with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s "Java Virtual Machine,"
Spyglass Inc.'s Web browser and extensive 2-D and 3-D graphics libraries, all running
on Microware Corp.'s "DAVID" operating system -- "make this the most
feature-populated box that's available today," Burgess said.
Jonathan Cassell, an analyst with DataQuest, said that perhaps the most compelling
feature that he saw in a pre-briefing of the Blackbird model was its support for
networked and set-top-resident games.
"It's certainly a platform that will catch the eye of the consumer," Cassell said. "It fits into
the evolution of the set-top that we're seeing occur out there, from today's passive
audio/video receivers into an interactive, multimedia entertainment and communications
system."
He described the Blackbird box as the "next step above" General Instrument Corp.'s
DCT-5000 and Scientific-Atlanta Inc.'s Explorer lines.
Burgess said Motorola will focus on European and Southeast Asian deployments first,
but plans are under way to comply with the U.S. OpenCable program, "after we work
through the sticky issues related to conditional access and how it's deployed."
GI and S-A own that piece of the puzzle, and they can license it out to other
manufacturers.
Internally, Motorola expects "about half" of its incoming business to come from
motherboard sales, and the other half from privately labeled set-tops that it will make for
other manufacturers over the next 18 to 24 months, Burgess said.
Initial orders, not yet disclosed, will be split between operators in Europe and Southeast
Asia, he added.
Motorola's presence in the North American set-top market "will be slower, unless, of
course, TCI can't get their advanced-digital set-tops on time," Burgess said, referring to
an order placed by Tele-Communications Inc. with GI for 15 million or more
DCT-5000 boxes.
Cassell said the Motorola design "could well become a play for consumer-electronics
firms" that may want to get into the digital set-top retail environment.
GI and S-A have said that they're prepared for an onslaught of consumer-electronics
competitors because their experience in integrated, end-to-end systems will give them
the edge that they need to rally.
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