More TV/Com history. It was based in San Diego near its competitor, General Instrument. No doubt they "shared" employees.
Television Link, Faster Transmission to Boost Computer Utility
Bradley J. Fikes
08/11/98
KRTBN Knight-Ridder Tribune Business News: North County Times, Escondido, Calif
Copyright (C) 1998 KRTBN Knight Ridder Tribune Business News; Source: World
Reporter (TM)
Aug. 11--More than two decades after personal computers were invented, they're in
fewer than half of American homes. Despite the best efforts of Microsoft, chip makers
such as Intel and computer sellers like Compaq, computers remain notoriously difficult to
use. Users find the experience more frustrating than fun. They don't casually turn on a
computer for entertainment the way they turn on a television.
That's soon to change. After several lackluster starts, the computer is coming to the
television. Smart boxes with chips, linked to standard television sets, will at last deliver
much of the promised entertainment wonderland hyped in the early 1990s. Products such
as Web TV, which deliver the Internet to a television screen via a phone line, have given
the first inkling of what's in store. These set-top boxes, costing less than $300, transform
the Internet from a hermetic ritual into a social event.
And Web TV is just a start. The real pizazz isn't coming through the pokey telephone
lines, delivering a measly 56,000 bits per second. It's coming through cable lines speeding
information at more than a million bits per second. It's coming from satellites beaming
information from skies to digital broadcast satellite receivers in millions of homes.
Quick, painless Web surfing, e-mail, video on demand, interactive shopping -- the panoply
of promised services -- will finally become available from the comfort of the couch as
the Internet versatility is grafted onto the television's ease of operation.
"TV is moving from the era of viewing to using," said Paul Palumbo, editor of the
Monterey-based newsletter Digital Broadcast and Programming.
Two years from now, cable consumers will be free to buy advanced digital cable set-top
boxes in consumer electronics stores. They'll no longer have to rent these boxes at
exorbitant rates from cable companies. The new boxes will be usable in any digital cable
system in the United States. Satellite television customers will likewise revel in a
communicopia of new programming choices.
Consumers won't know or care about the high-tech wizardry packed inside, Palumbo
said.
Much of this future is being designed today in San Diego and the North County. In
Rancho Bernardo, TV / COM , a division of Hyundai Electronics, is developing digital
satellite and cable set-top boxes. The underdog company is trying to use the digital shift
to take the lead from General Instrument Inc. Headquartered in Pennsylvania, General
Instrument is developing digital satellite boxes and cable modems from its division in
Sorrento Mesa.
General Instrument's San Diego division sparked the digital television race in 1990, when
it developed the first feasible digital standard for high-definition television.
At that time, a Japanese-backed analog high-definition television standard appeared
assured of victory, wrote authors Daniel Burstein and David Kline in their book, "Road
Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway." The authors
credited General Instrument with ushering in the digital television age by showing that an
all-digital broadcast system was technically feasible.
A General Instrument advertisement at Lindbergh Field informs deplaning passengers
that this breakthrough standard was conceived in San Diego.
Digital systems can squeeze more information into the transmission spectrum of a
satellite or land-based transmitter than can traditional analog systems, said Greg
LaBrach, a General Instrument spokesman in San Diego. The compression advantage
has reached 20 to 1, he said. This means the owner of a satellite transponder with digital
compression can transmit 20 channels instead of only one, or can rent out unused
capacity. In either case, the per-channel cost of transmission is greatly lowered.
Another advantage, from the broadcaster's point of view, is that digital signals can be
easily encrypted to prevent unauthorized viewers from stealing the signal, LaBrach said.
General Instrument is the leader in digital cable in terms of sales of set-top boxes to
cable systems, said Jonathan Cassell, a senior industry analyst with Dataquest, a
research company in San Jose.
In 1994, General Instrument's digital compression technology was deployed with the
Primestar satellite broadcast system. In 1996, cable giant TCI began deploying General
Instrument's digital cable system.
Keeping up with this competition is expensive: Last week, Hyundai Electronics
announced that TV / COM is up for sale. The company is part of Korea's cash-strapped
Hyundai Group, hard hit by the Asian economic crisis. While the hunt for a buyer goes
on, TV / COM will continue its work as usual, said Ellie Sanchez, a company
spokeswoman.
The sale would be the fourth this decade for the company formerly known as Oak
Communications.
In 1990, it was sold to the Lorain Group. In 1991 the Concord Group became majority
owner, and the company was renamed TV / COM the next year.
In 1995 the company was purchased by Hyundai Electronics.
Under Hyundai's ownership, the company has plunged into the digital revolution with
fervor. This includes developing digital cable boxes, direct broadcast satellite boxes and
the MPEG-2 digital video compression standard.
In July, TV / COM announced it had landed its first contract in wireless cable,
technically called Multi-channel, Multi-point Distribution Service, or MMDS. The
company will provide digital set-top boxes to SkyCable Inc. of Canada, delivery
scheduled to begin in October.
"They're a good company ... just first-rate," Dataquest's Cassell said.
But however respected TV / COM may be with industry insiders, it's not a household
name, nor, for that matter, is General Instrument. So to switch from selling set-top boxes
to cable companies to direct consumer marketing, these companies will have to hook up
with a well-known consumer electronics company such as Sony or RCA.
"They're trying to realign themselves and become more and more brand-and
retail-oriented," Cassell said of the competitors.
TV / COM has already started that realignment, said Merritt Doyle, the company's
executive director of marketing and business development. In May, the company teamed
up with Grundig to make digital television set-top boxes for the British television market.
TV / COM will supply the design, but the boxes will be sold under the Grundig name.
These boxes will receive digital signals over the air.
In the United States, TV / COM is taking part in industry attempts to hammer out a
standard for the digital set-top cable boxes to be sold beginning in the year 2000. The
so-called "Open Cable" standard now under development will provide a common design
specification that any manufacturer can use, Doyle said, giving consumers the benefit of
price competition. When people move anywhere in the United States, they'll be able to
use their old box on their new cable system.
The boxes will likely use two competing varieties of software. One is the Java
programming language from Sun Microsystems, and the other is Microsoft's Windows
CE operating system. Local cable operators will decide which to use, Doyle said.
While the hardware sets the technical limits of what the box can do, the software
determines its capabilities, said Digital Broadcast's Palumbo.
Both flavors of software can be modified or upgraded by the cable operators to provide
new features, Palumbo said, such as the ability to make financial transactions. Internet
features such as e-mail and Web browsing will be standard.
From the consumer's point of view, the best thing about these new digital cable boxes
will be their ability to fold together all these previously separate functions into one
easy-to-use system, running through the high bandwidth of a cable connection. Web TV
and other attempts to graft the Internet onto a television will seem crude by comparison.
Presumably, Palumbo said, the viewers won't have to worry about the software problems
that bedevil computer users -- or get bored waiting for the information or entertainment
they want to travel down the skinny "cocktail-straw" pipes of telephone lines.
In other words, the technology will become invisible to consumers, Palumbo said. They
won't need to know what's inside these new set-top boxes any more than they need to
know what's inside their television.
"The thing that's interesting and so exciting is that the Internet is by definition database
navigation and communications-driven," Palumbo said.
"Combine that with television's much more robust capacity, and you can do a lot with it.
It presents a very compelling proposition, with new areas of business that companies can
explore." |
