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To: PaulW who wrote (37384)	11/23/1998 1:42:00 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

William S took some time to answer a Q on the SUNW thread. Here is what he said............. From: +William Sheppard Monday, Nov 23 1998 12:58PM ET Reply # of 11910 J Fieb wrote: What will be the role of JAVA in set tops? Within the next decade virtually all television broadcast will be digital. This will allow the possibility of enhancing the viewing experience with interactivity, additional sports or news information, online shopping, or a virtually limitless range of other applications and services. To do this will require some sort of application environment to execute these programs. Today's settop boxes are based on a wide variety of application environments - OpenTV, PowerTV, pSOS, VxWorks, MediaHighway, DAVID, and others. None of these are compatible with one another, which presents a tremendous hurdle for the content developers of the world who would like to create content once and have it work on as many settop boxes and televisions worldwide as possible. Most analysts would suggest that none of these environments are likely to gain critical mass in this marketplace. So that leaves us with the question of how to provide a single environment which can will work across a wide variety of devices from many manufacturers. There are probably two realistic possibilities: WinCE or PersonalJava. There are many forces working to keep WinCE from having the monopoly in the consumer space it has on the desktop, as well as a variety of technical reasons why WinCE is less-than-ideal. pJava, on the other hand, is widely supported by most consumer electronics and software vendors, and has been pubicly supported by most of the existing platforms found in the settop. Therefore, the best-case result for SUNW shareholders (and, I would suggest, consumers in general) would be for PersonalJava to become the standard application environment for digital television. The DVB Java discussion is one major step towards this result. Will these JAVA applications require silicon to accelerate the process? or all Software? Hardware-based Java support can greatly accelerate execution of Java code, but isn't a requirement. The advanced settop boxes currently under development have microprocessors easily powerful enough to run Java code at acceptable speeds. Silicon to enhance this performance will be one of many design choices to be made in future boxes. Bill. Good luck on those JAVA talks......It would be nice to have an agreement in time for the Western Cable Show..