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As if creating a retail market for standardized digital cable set-top boxes wasn't enough of a challenge, the cable and consumer electronics industries now are deep into the task of designing and manufacturing digital cable-ready TV sets.
Satisfying both the implementation requirements of its OpenCable standard and the requirements of retail consumer electronics marketplace competition will not be easy. And the question remains who-besides cable operators and the government-is hungry for the retail-oriented, cable-ready equipment that OpenCable was created to help foster.
OpenCable is the cable industry initiative to define the next generation of digital cable set-tops and other devices with an eye toward creating a true consumer retail market for the hardware necessary to receive cable programming.
Don Dulchinos, vice president of advanced platforms and services at the Cable Television Laboratories Inc. research and development consortium, says the OpenCable specification essentially was completed last year with finalization of a removable point of deployment (POD) card by vendors Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta. The so-called PODs plug into OpenCable set-tops or other devices to provide programming security functions for the cable operator-to control access to premium channels, for example.
"An OpenCable TV set assumes the POD card slot will be built into the front of the television itself," Dulchinos says. Next will come the OpenCable certification process for set-top manufacturers. This cycle of development and testing has averaged, by comparison, about a year in duration for cable modems being certified for the DOCSIS standard, Dulchinos says. The same certification process will apply to OpenCable television sets, he says, noting that the average development cycle for a consumer electronic product is at least 18 months.
Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta have applied for OpenCable set-top box certification, and eight more companies are testing their box designs in pre-certification dry runs at CableLabs.
Dulchinos notes that some manufacturers already are showing OpenCable prototypes. Panasonic has been showing one at the Western Show and later at this month's International Consumer Electronics show, for example.
"An example is the prototype Panasonic TV set shown at the Western Show and then at CES. There's a card slot in the chassis forming the base of that TV."
The cable people have a lot of incentive for the CE industry to move ahead with the integrated sets: this month's CES show featured several of the growing number of upstart vendors offering technology integrating Internet access and interactivity features with standard broadcast TV sets.
EspriTV Inc. made a big splash at CES with its own integrated television product providing Internet access via the users' existing ISP account. The sets, which will retail for about $700 for a 16-inch set, utilize a browser from PlanetWeb and are powered by an x86-level microprocessor.
Also, chip developer TeleCruz Technology announced a product development agreement to integrate its interactive TV technology into Zenith's multimedia television platform. Zenith plans to begin shipping the sets, which will offer free dialup Internet access, by early spring.
TeleCruz also has deals with Daewoo and with electronics giant Panasonic, which in the third quarter plans to ship sets capable of either 56k dialup access or DSL access via ISP Earthlink, although initially only dialup access is being offered.
Further trials are under way with AT&T Broadband and a deal is pending with ISP Prodigy, which offers DSL access, according to Jodie Hughes, president and CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based TeleCruz. Hughes notes that the electronics integrating TeleCruz' technology will add only about $100 to the retail cost of the set.
Hughes also says the company is looking to provide cable modem-connectivity but that the OpenCable market remains "premature."
Dulchinos says that although no one formally has applied for OpenCable certification of an integrated TV, other vendors working on such products may include Samsung, LG Electronics and Philips. The next wave of OpenCable certifications begins late next month.
"We're working on digital TV sets that are able to handle both HDTV terrestrial reception and OpenCable-compliant communications," says Haig Krakirian, vice president of software engineering at Pioneer digital technologies.
He anticipates one vendor will have to take the lead in launching an OpenCable TV, proving the market exists before the rest of the CE industry follows.
"The CE manufacturers are not going to put anything in a TV set unless they feel a standard is totally finalized," says Matt Wong, VP engineering for Canal+ U.S. Technologies. "Merging together the digital cable box and digital ATSC TV sets will not be easy, and there are many layers of integration to address, such as differences in the signal modulation and power supply, let alone the fact cable is still reluctant to support wide-screen HDTV."
"The situation at the moment is pretty stagnant," says Strategist Group broadband analyst Keith Kennebeck. "The OpenCable push into set-top boxes hasn't yet come to fruition with actual boxes in the retail market, and that needs to happen before there is any substantial effort by cable's 'old boys network' to push OpenCable into cable-ready TV sets."
Also, most consumers do not yet even know about OpenCable so they cannot appreciate the value proposition of having a box they can plug and play anywhere in the country.
Says Kennebeck: "There's little incentive now to buy an analog cable-ready TV set, so it will take a big public education campaign before consumers will want OpenCable TVs."
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