According to Inteco, the market for multimedia potentially is worth $3,000m. With the two major competitive multimedia delivery mechanisms, Intel-IBM’s DVI digital video interactive technology, and Philips’ CD-I compact disk interactive medium, poised to re-live the battle of VHS versus Betamax in the world of video recorders, and more and more third party developers becoming involved in the race to get applications on the shelves, that market could soon begin to explode. With this in mind, Computergram took off to Swindon to see what Intel UK thought DVI’s chances were. To date, the existing DVI applications are niche ones being developed by third-parties for specific customers Florida State Tourist Information Board, for example, uses a DVI-based point-of-information system. British Rail has commissioned London-based Hodos Creative Technology to develop a train simulator for routelearning and general training in reaction to traffic lights and so on. And ICL Plc is working with Oxford-based Attica Cybernetics on a prototype for a schools package based on the national curriculum.
Experience
As yet there are no horizontal applications available, although this is where DVI developers will soon be directing all their energies. Says Alan Priestly, Intel UK’s DVI applications specialist, the software companies are using the vertical markets to build up experience – off-the-shelf DVI packages for the professional business user should be around in about a year’s time. One of the main uses for DVI on the desktop will be in videoconferencing – currently, videoconferencing costs an arm and a leg to get up and running, since it’s all conducted via satellite with huge dedicated receiver boxes. Intel has a five-year joint development project going with Peabody, Massachusetts-based PictureTel Corp to produce videoconferencing silicon, the aim being to bring videoconferencing onto the personal computer. This has already been demonstrated in prototype. The ability to bring videoconferencing down to the desktop will depend on third generation compression silicon Intel is currently at second silicon. In the future, says Priestly, anyone with a personal computer, camera, video-audio receiver and a phone link will be able to videoconference, with anyone else possessing the same basic equipment. At the moment, he explains, you need a huge box of tricks and a dedicated phone line – once you’ve paid the hundreds of pounds a minute for satellite time, its still cheaper to physically fly to the conference’s actual location. DVI, which Intel aims to have embedded on every personal computer motherboard by the year 2000, will enable not only videoconferencing from the desktop, but will also enable the user to send video-mail, without a dedicated server. One other potential desktop application, says Priestly, is in user interfaces – for example, DVI could be the basis for an on-system interactive helpdesk. Intel is a little more down to earth than Dorking, Surrey-based Philips Interactive Media Systems when it comes to multimedia and the consumer, for it is prepared to admit that the discovery of a real application which will hook in the home user is still a long way off.
By Sue Norris
Maybe this belief is tied up with the fact that Intel and its long line of OEM customers haven’t yet got around to exploring the potential of the consumer market for DVI. But Priestly is adamant that Intel is serious about this market, even if it won’t be making its move there for another year or two. He reckons video games will be the vehicle to get DVI into people’s homes, though he says it will undoubtedly be the Japanese market where the technology first takes off. For DVI, it will be the responsibility of one of Intel’s OEM customers to ensure that there are enough applications available to get the ball rolling. One future home use of DVI that Priestly foresees is in high-definition television – if this really takes off, he says, the technology will need a good compression algorithm, and a DVI chip would be just the job. One point that CD-I developers const
antly make about DVI is that, while many homes do have personal computers nowadays, most don’t have the minimum 80386SX-16 processor requirement to run DVI. Priestly points out, though, that while the personal computer is the medium it has chosen to deliver multimedia, this environment is not essential to the technology. DVI capabilities are provided currently by a delivery card – ActionMedia 750, which consists of two 80750 chips: a pixel processor and a display processor; 2Mb of video-RAM; and a capture card, which does the audiovisual analogue-digital conversion. Today these are slotted into personal computers, but the potential is there for DVI to be built into a dedicated black box with a basic personal computer architecture. In addition to the DVI chip set, a storage mechanism is needed – CD-ROM being the recommended format since it is cheap and has a large capacity. Priestly reckons an OEM customer could put together a DVI delivery system for only $400m of hardware roughly the same price intended for Philips consumer compact disk-interactive players.
Bus bandwidth
DVI, the research for which was initiated by General Electric Co, from which Intel acquired the technology in October 1988, was from the beginning developed as a means of bringing motion video onto the personal computer. It is the silicon that effects the essential compression required to digitise motion video DVI compresses data to 150Kbps – more than sufficient for a standard MS-DOS personal computer with a bus bandwidth typically of 2Mbps. Philips’ CD-I technology, meanwhile, doesn’t have such powerful compression capabilities – the CD-I players use a Motorola 68070 chip which has been optimised for multimedia, but does not have the compression capabilities required to deliver full-motion video over a personal computer bus, so when Philips adds full-motion video to CD-I next year, the average personal computer won’t be able to cope with it. The advantage of DVI, says Priestly, is that the silicon is not dedicated to one operation – it is re-programmable, so it can support everything that DVI supports, such as real-time video manipulation. The DVI chips are not CPU- or bus-specific – there is already a Sun- and an Macintosh-based DVI card, for example. DVI applications development requires the 80750 chip card; capture card; an 80386-based MS-DOS personal computer with large hard disk; input peripherals such as a camera or scanner; and development tools. Intel offers C libraries, but there are several third-party tools available for DVI. These include Authology Multimedia; MediaScript; Lumena, and Hyperties. All the relevant equipment is available from Thorn EMI Business Communications, Intel’s UK DVI marketing partner. For the entire kit, including peripherals, the cost would be $12,000.
