Hewlett-Packard Co’s Interactive TV Appliances division is preparing to sign up for the CL9000 family of set-top decoder components from Milpitas, California-based C-Cube Microsystems for use in the television set-top boxes it is developing. The attraction of the CL9100, which is set for production in late September or early October, is that it decodes all of the major video compression protocols in the market today – MPEG-2, DigiCipher II and MPEG-1. While companies that are working with the samples, such as Microware Systems Corp in Des Moines, Iowa, say that it is too early yet to give a definitive evaluation, several of the world’s major set-top box manufacturers, including Scientific-Atlanta Corp and Compression Laboratories Inc, have already signed on. The digital set-top box, which has yet to emerge in anything but prototype form, is the closest thing to a revolution in the emerging interactive television market. Even with the simple task of ordering a film, the set-top box must be able to handle commands from the user via a remote control at any time, no matter what else is happening in the system. Second, the set-top box must be able to handle an incoming data stream from the movie server at roughly 1.54Mbps, the minimum for a 30-frame-per-second full-screen, full-motion video picture. Further, this data stream must be decoded, split into separate audio and video data streams and then fed into separate audio and video processors on a time-synchronised basis. All the while, the set-top box must be able to accept or send commands to or from the network server, which may include displaying any number of selection menus to the user and interacting with them. Depending on the amount of functionality required, smart set-top boxes range in cost from $3,000 for the workstation-style model still awaited from Silicon Graphics Inc to between $200 and $500. Even at the lowest possible cost, it would take $30,000m to equip the 60m US homes wired with cable. It it no surprise then, that the nation’s second-largest cable operator, Time Warner Inc, recently contracted for 1m analogue set-top boxes from Scientific-Atlanta to be delivered over the next two years.
