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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: VINTHO who wrote (41409)	5/22/1999 10:56:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

An interview with MediaOne Group Inc. chief technology officer Bud Wonsiewicz.................................... Hey Bud, is anybody else going to use those DVB boxes???????????? MCN: What's your sense about other major cable operators? Are they interested? BW: Absolutely. We wouldn't have made the choice if we were the only operator. You saw this in our announcement endorsement from Time Warner and Comcast. Since then, we continue to have encouraging discussions with them and other key major cable companies. We've all got to negotiate with the vendors independently. But they've been very supportive of that as a standard, and we're pretty optimistic. A real key will be when the first city is up and running. A lot of folks are waiting to see that happen. ***************************************************************** Bud, are you guys going to use Divi/Canal+/Philips for other systems?????????????????????????????????? MCN: You're planning your second and third digital launches by the end of this quarter. Will those deployments include the Philips Consumer Electronics Co./Canal Plus/DiviCom Inc. DVB boxes you announced in February? BW: It's our goal to have a DVB launch in the second quarter. We're working real hard, and the signs are real encouraging. I just visited Philips and Canal Plus last week, and I was really amazed by what I saw. It confirms my feeling that DVB is going to be quite an amazing innovation in the industry. MCN: What are the types of things it's bringing to the table? BW: The main thing it's bringing is the fact that it's a world standard, so I think there are in excess of 5 million set-top boxes deployed. The leading American manufacturer has on the order of 1 million, 1.5 million. The relative scale of DVB is much higher. In the electronics industry, anything that's dominated by silicon is dominated by the number of units produced. And you have a worldwide market that includes satellite, cable and direct-broadcast [satellite]. I also saw OnDigital in England, their terrestrial-broadcast system, and they're using a DVB box. You now have the ability for very large scale. That allows you to create new generations of chips very quickly, and to introduce pretty amazing new functionality and lower cost. It's more like the dynamics of the PC [personal computer] industry. But specifically, you would see electronic program guides that were very sophisticated, very graphic- and video-oriented. You'd see the size of the circuit boards having dropped in half, and the costs generally being proportional to the area. You'd see the ready integration of TiVo [Inc.] type disk storage, so you'll be able to time-shift movies and store your favorite shows without much programming and no tapes or whatever. That has very big implications for the cable industry, and it has implications for VOD [video-on-demand]. I believe the local storage on your set-top and the storage in our nodes will be complementary. But that would be a great example of something that's already up and running in Europe in prototype. They're just on a much faster innovation track than our domestic units. So I'm very excited about DVB in the long run because the worldwide scale is going to allow a level of integration and functionality, and it will bring amazing benefits to our customers. The OpenCable standard has to get that kind of volume. Otherwise, we will be continually disadvantaged with respect to satellite or terrestrial, which is on that curve. We no longer have a monopoly on multichannel, and our ability to compete really crucially depends on our ability to get PC-industry-like dynamics on the set-top box. MCN: Do you see the scale DVB has speeding the quantity of boxes to market? BW: Yes. The key manufacturers are already producing very large quantities for both the satellite and terrestrial and the international cable market. In a sense, it's another example of how the world shrunk. We pursue two proprietary domestic standards at our peril. The thing that's getting really obvious is telephones, cellular telephones. Having just spent a week in Europe, I am astounded by the GSM [Global System for Mobile Communication] phones. They're basically one-half the size of our best domestic phones. Somebody at a meeting flipped out this phone -- it's a Nokia [Inc.], but it flips open, and it's got a beautiful high-resolution screen that's good enough to get a fax on and a keyboard that's a little bigger than the pager keyboard Motorola [Inc.'s] got. And it's a phone and a speakerphone. It's amazing. And it's all just numbers of units. It isn't incredible technology or anything: It's just the fact that you've got the whole world buying to a standard, so that just crunches the cost of the silicon. I see DVB as an incredibly strategic move for the industry. MCN: Has anybody started to follow your lead? General Instrument Corp., for one, said it would be working with you on an OpenCable type of box. BW: They're committed to a DVB, OpenCable implementation. I'm using DVB a little loosely because we're using their conditional access, but we're using the rest of the North American electrical standards. It isn't a pure DVB box. The precise way I try to say it when I write it is DVB/OpenCable. We've had a number of discussions with other firms about pushing the standard forward. We're pretty optimistic that you'll be seeing significant events. multichannel.com