PowerTV Inc, created and majority-owned by Scientific-Atlanta Inc, has won third party support for its proposed processor-independent operating system for television set-top boxes – Motorola Inc’s 68000 and the PowerPC are the ones that have been mentioned as early favourites. Montreal, Quebec and Austin, Texas-based Metrowerks Inc, which does software development tools for the Macintosh, plans to provide tools for developing software for use in interactive television under the PowerTV OS. Ameritech Corp, Pacific Telesis Group Inc Video Services and Southern New England Telecommunications Corp have all chosen the PowerTV OS for use in their interactive networks. Metrowerks will create and distribute a new version of its CodeWarrior development package, and it will the same tools, debuggers and environment as the Macintosh version. The PowerTV version of CodeWarrior will run on all Macintosh and MacOS-compatible systems and will output code for the embedded PowerPC that is used in the Scientific-Atlanta Digital Home Communication Terminal.
