It turns out that Sony Corp is Microsoft’s mystery digital broadcasting partner anticipated earlier this week (CI No 3,383). The two say they will work together to push for the convergence of personal computer, digital television technology and consumer audio visual systems, and have entered into a technology cross licensing agreement. Sony says it will license the Windows CE operating system, while Microsoft will take Sony’s Home Networking Module middleware. Sony says it wants to see a seamless integration of PCs with audio visual consumer products. And so that they don’t continue to evolve down separate paths, plans to work with Microsoft in three areas: production, transmission and reception. That means a compromise on Microsoft’s part, and an acknowledgement that it needs to support the use of the television industry’s 1080 interlaced displays as the preferred format for HDTV production and archiving because it is the highest resolution format which is cost effective and currently available. But it’s got Sony to agree to develop production equipment implementing the PC camp’s preferred 480 progressive scan format in the near future and 1080 progressive equipment as the ultimate goal in the longer term. Speaking at the National Association of Broadcasters’ 1998 Conference, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie said the real significance of the announcement was that we all know we’re going, and want to get there without combat. Otherwise HDTV will never get started. It’s not clear yet how Sony will use Windows CE – it has its own operating system for set top boxes – but it’s not likely to use it at all until a multimedia-enabled version comes out at some unspecified time in the future, supporting the IEEE 1394 Firewire physical connection that is the basis of Sony’s NNM Home Networking Module middleware. HNM, the goal of which, says Sony, is to make consumer devices more simple to operate, implements higher level device discovery and control protocols to tie together televisions, digital video disks, video cassette recorders and set-top boxes through a single standard. But Microsoft is already working on the CE-enabled version of its WebTV software that Sony already licenses. Sony also recently licensed PersonalJava from Microsoft’s big rival, Sun Microsystems Inc, for its digital AV products (CI No 3,378).
