A string of announcements from Hewlett-Packard Co, headlined by news yesterday of the acquisition of CaLan Inc, make it clear that the company is determined to be a major force in the supply of equipment for the digital interactive television revolution. Terms of the acquisition of CaLan were not disclosed, but by adding the 55-employee company, Hewlett claims to be able to offer cable television operators a single, full-service supplier that provides a comprehensive offering of test and measurement products, and network-monitoring systems from system maintenance through status monitoring and proof-of-performance testing. The company is based in Dingmans Ferry, Pennsylvania but operations will be consolidated at the Hewlett base Santa Rosa, California. Earlier, the company licensed from Xing Technology Corp, Arroyo Grande, California XingSound audio-compression technology for use in the high-performance broadcast video server Hewlett-Packard is putting together. It says that by using XingSound MPEG audio compression, its system delivers 44KHz 16-bit CD-quality stereo at 8-to-1 or better compression ratios. For its set-top boxes, which sound as if they should be the cheapest as well as the simplest in the industry as they use only the 8088 as the processor, Hewlett-Packard has gone to General Instrument Corp for a licence to its DigiCipher II access, control, compression and transmission technology so that its interactive boxes will be compatible with the General’s uplink encoding and head-end equipment. It is also buying in analogue descrambling technology for compatibility with many existing cable systems; 64-QAM quadrature amplitude modulation receiver technology for receiving digital video signals; and Dolby AC3 multichannel digital sound technology from Dolby Laboratories Inc. And it has won USAnimation Inc for its HP 9000 Series 700 workstations: the digital image processing software and programming production company will offer its software exclusively on the Unix workstations. The software is an electronic ink-and-paint system that enables animators to colour and composite traditional animation digitally against painted backgrounds, three-dimensional simulation and live-action footage. USAnimation originally wrote its software to run on supercomputers.
