Following the restructuring of Sun Microsystems Inc and Thomson Multimedia SA’s Thomson Sun Interactive television alliance, their Thomson Sun Interactive LLC spin out is now offering an adaptation layer allowing its OpenTV object-oriented run-time environment to be hosted on set-top devices running Wind River Systems Inc’s VxWorks real-time operating system. Hyundai Electronics America’s requirement to implement OpenTV on the set-tops – receiver boxes and interactive television boxes – it is building using VxWorks spurred development of the adaptation layer. The companies say the code will be licensed to other vendors and will allow set-top developers to implement OpenTV on any processor architecture supported by VxWorks, including PowerPC, Sparc, 68k, i960, iAPX-86, Alpha, Mips and PA-RISC. Wind River believes the adaptation layer will provide valuable openings into new vertical markets, but like us, it can’t understand why Sun and Thomson didn’t just call the spin out OpenTV; so we asked. The company says it wanted to leverage the Sun and Thomson names in customer bids and not get tied to a single product name for its operation. OpenTV’s already up on Integrated Systems Inc’s pSOS embedded kernel; the company says it’ll likely port to Microware CorpOs OS-9 because of demand, even though Microware offers the rival David operating system for interactive television. It’ll license Sun’s forthcoming JavaOS and implement OpenTV on top, but expect Java’s memory and processor requirements will preclude its use in set-tops. Boxes with TCP facilities would also be able to route cable-based internet services to PCs. The company’s almost completed field tests in Italy and South Africa and will begin production ships of OpenTV following its announcement at the International Broadcast Conference in Netherlands in a month or so. Thomson Sun Interactive LLC is still based on Sun’s Mountain View, California premises. The Thomson/Sun alliance was formed in November 1994 to develop an interactive television software environment. It has since been adopted by interactive television players in Europe and South Africa for trials, including France Telecom SA, which will get 2,000 decoders from the alliance with the environment embedded. It’s run by CEO Elliot Broadwin, previously VP sales and marketing for US and Pacific Rim for the alliance. Other recent appointments include Ian Halifax as CFO, Vincent Dureau as VP engineering, and Eric Dentler as VP sales.
