For its showcase offering at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, Thomson Consumer Electronics has settled on a television set-top box based on Network Computer standards. The company is the US arm of Thomson Multimedia SA, which the French government wanted to hand over to Daewoo Electronics Co until demonstrations of naked xenophobia on the part of French trades unions – for whom the brotherhood of labor clearly stops firmly at the French border – forced craven surrender and humiliating climbdown by the government. At the show in Las Vegas, Thomson said it plans to introduce a television set-top device in the spring that will be built around the Advanced RISC Machines Plc ARM RISC and will enable consumers to use their television to surf the Internet. The $300 device, to be sold under the RCA brand name in the US, will adhere to the reference design laid down by Oracle Corp’s Network Computer Inc unit, and and will easily connect to a standard color television. Consumer ease of use, says the French company, will be assured by Thomson’s relationship with NetChannel Inc, a venture capital-funded start-up that provides programs and services provider, available on a subscription fee basis, and has close relations with but no financial connection to Oracle. Although on the ARM to start with, Thomson says that it may use chips from other manufacturers in later versions of the product.
