Motorola Inc launches its anticipated Blackbird set top box cum home entertainment device at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam today (CI No 3,490). Described as a hardware reference design, Motorola believes Blackbird is going to represent a big step towards the convergent of existing home technologies. According to Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector European marketing director David Jones, the Blackbird spec can be used for customer to build any type of consumer device from a DVD player to an interactive set-top or a games console. The whole spec is based on the Motorola MPC 800 family of embedded Power PC microprocessors, especially the MPC 821 which has a built-in communications and I/O processing module. If Blackbird takes off, Motorola will have a massive market for its embedded Power PC chips. The current software that Motorola is using is the David real-time operating system from Microware Systems Inc and Spyglass Inc’s browser. But most importantly is the incorporation of the Project X video entertainment platform from Los Altos, California-based VM Labs, based around replacement circuitry for MPEG 2 decoders and a set of development tools and APIs. These will give Blackbird high quality graphics capabilities. For different uses Motorola will be selling add on modules, to add such capabilities as networking, including ADSL, cable modems and cable and satellite decoders. For the first line of interactive TV trials Motorola has also put a software modem into the box. The Blackbird is an evolution of a prototype set-top called Hellcat developed for the 1995 Tele-TV joint venture of three US telco’s Bell Atlantic Corp, Nynex Corp, and Pacific Telesis Inc, who were planning to develop a video-on-demand platform. So far Motorola has only signed two customers. Internet over TV service provider Uniview Technologies Corp, and Hong Kong Telecom is using a variant of Blackbird for its ADSL-based video-on-demand trials. Motorola expects other as yet unnamed partners to release the products in around six months, and expect them to cost between $300 and $700.
