Apple Computer Inc’s gestating television set-top decoder – the Apple Interactive TV Box, which is going into trials here in the UK and in Belgium, and with an educational start-up in the US, is built not around an embedded PowerPC but rather the Motorola Inc 68040 processor, and sells for about $750 in small quantities. It runs a subset of the Mac OS operating system, QuickTime, QuickDraw, and has a hefty 4Mb of main memory, 2Mb of ROM, an MPEG-1 decoder, NTSC and PAL video, and support for E1 and T1 telephone protocols. The company has been discussing its interactive television plans with MacWeek, saying that it hopes to license some of its technology, notably QuickTime and QuickDraw, to television set-top box makers and to promote its multimedia tools for interactive content development. If we’re not greedy – if we go out with the appropriate pieces at appropriate prices – we can garner a fairly major piece of this industry, multiple times more than the 10% or so share [Apple has of the worldwide PC market], Rick Shriner, vice-president of Apple Core Technology told the paper. We can have a piece of the Mac out there in almost every part of it. The next generation of the set-top box, expected in 1996, will use a PowerPC chip and a kernel specifically optimised for interactive television; it will feature an MPEG-2 decoder and add multiple interfaces, including phone, cable and Asynchronous Transfer Mode, the paper reports. The company also has a Processor Direct slot MPEG board, which it says will ship this summer for about $300 bundled with five or six MPEG CD-ROM titles. From next month, developers can buy a tool kit of the board, software and documentation for about $200.
