Making good their summer promise to have something to show for their alliance on interactive television this quarter (CI No 2,466), Sun Microsystems Inc and the Indianapolis-based Thomson Consumer Electronics arm of Thomson SA, Paris have unveiled Open TV, describing it as a machine-independent operating system for television set-top decoders. Open TV is actually a software framework developed by Thomson Consumer Electronics that resides on media servers at one end and set-top receivers at the other. Sun is providing servers, workstations and networking for the system. The two showed samples of applications they expect to be created for use on top of Open TV, including a ticket-ordering system on the back of an MTV-style music show, the addition of interactive information and product request services to currently running advertisements, and a video-on-demand system with full fast forward, rewind and freeze frame control over the movie chosen. The two say Open TV will enable cable, telecommunic ations, satellite and other broadcast network operators to download interactive applications to set-top decoders through existing broadcast networks or Asynchronous Transfer Mode switched networks. Point-to-point support will follow. In the demonstration, servers sent interactive MPEG 2-compliant data to set-top receivers over Open TV, which comes with tools for building applications. The two companies formally signed their July 1994 outline agreement last month.
