The board of Cable Television Laboratories Inc, better know as CableLabs, has decided to speed up the adoption of the OpenCable project that will ensure interoperability between digital set-top box systems. The first boxes conforming to the standard will be ready some time next year. CableLabs is a cable industry consortium representing cable companies of North and South America and its chairman is Tele-Communications Inc’s chief executive John Malone. CableLabs received 23 responses to a request for information in late August. The OpenCable spec will not specify which processor or operating system cable boxes must use, but is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for vendors to interoperate at the middleware layer using current internet standards, such as HTML, CGI, JavaScript and plug-ins. The key APIs are for digital cable television signals (MPEG-2), consumer privacy system, copyright protection system, the high- speed connection interfaces, which will incorporate CableLabs other spec-of-the-moment, Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, or DOCSIS and the interfaces required to write interactive applications.