making DVD smart

Emedia Professional, Feb, 1999 by Dana J. Parker

if you were waiting for the dust to settle on DVD-based formats, don't hold your breath. It's not over yet.

Now that the DVD-Audio specification is in near-final form, the various DVD disc formats are almost settled enough to be called standards. The next serious confrontation for consumer electronics companies will be over DVD-based "information appliances" appearing soon in a consumer electronics store near you. If you think things are confusing now, pity the poor consumer when the current incomprehensible mess of DVD-based devices is eclipsed by the next wave of variations on a standard theme. Look for many of them to surface--and perhaps as quickly subside--starting later this year.

For example, Sony is expected to release a new game machine, which is likely to include a modem, Internet connection, and a player for DVD-Video and DVD-ROMs. Dreamcast, the new video game system from Sega recently introduced in Japan, comes with an on-board modern that lets users play games via the Internet, exchange email, chat electronically, and browse Web pages. It also comes with a high-speed CD-ROM drive that could easily become a DVD drive by the time it's introduced in North America in November. "Interactive entertainment platforms" allowing users to play games, watch movies, and access interactive television services are expected from Motorola, Thomson, and Toshiba. Several manufacturers, including Toshiba, Hitachi, and Philips, are expected to offer WebDVD.

Fortunately, there's more--and less--to this coming wave of information appliances than the daunting prospect of a dozen or more different boxes vying for a coveted place in your entertainment center. In sharp contrast to the traditional "every manufacturer for himself" scenario, there are indications that consumer electronics manufacturers are leaning away from going it alone with unique, expensive-to-develop-for hardwired boxes, and toward forming alliances and using outsourced operating platforms and chips to build boxes with a shared command set. Instead of a plethora of proprietary platforms, there could be two or three basic types of shared operating platforms for consumer electronic devices.

making an information appliance out of a sow's ear

The three major contenders for the immediate future of interactive entertainment are VM Labs, with its Nuon technology; Microsoft, with Windows CE; and an alliance of six Japanese and European consumer electronics companies with individual, proprietary processor chips and RTOS' (Real Time Operating Systems). With lines blurred and plans ill-defined, these three are not the only ones vying for the world's television sets, and they aren't approaching the challenge in the same way either.

VM Labs, the start-up Mountain View, California-based chip design company founded by Richard Miller, is betting on Nuon, the technology formerly known as Project-X. Nuon--whose name is arguably its least attractive feature is a custom-designed chip that can replace the MPEG-2 chip in DVD-Video players. But the chip does more than decode MPEG-2; it's smart, powerful, and flexible enough to make a game console, a Web browser, a digital television receiver, or a videophone out of a DVD player plugged into a television. The chip itself costs about the same as an MPEG-2 chip, and VM Labs plans to profit by licensing its intellectual property to chip makers and software publishers. Thomson, Motorola, and Toshiba have already thrown their support behind Nuon chips, so Nuon chip makers have a ready-made market. And software vendors--including videogame publishers Activision, Berkeley Systems, Fox Interactive, Hasbro Interactive, and Psygnosis--will pay royalties on every game title developed to run on the Nuon chip.

Meanwhile, EE Times' Junko Yoshida reports an "uneasy alliance" among Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, Hitachi, Philips, and Thomson, who are working to agree upon a standard API for everything from interactive data and entertainment services to peripheral products such as TVs, DVD equipment, set-tops, VCRs, printers, and cameras. This is far more daunting than it sounds, since each of these companies markets its own digital consumer systems, most of which use a proprietary CPU and RTOS. The API--when and if it is defined--would almost certainly force each company to quickly modify its own RTOS, or else develop a common "middleware" level to go between the operating system and the API. Although the companies have been meeting informally since mid-1998, time is quickly running out--manufacturing products for Christmas typically begins in June. The only thing they have agreed upon so far is a common goal: to keep Windows CE from dominating the consumer electronics market.

As usual, Microsoft--with its Windows CE (for consumer electronics) operating system--is being perceived as either the common enemy, the path of least resistance, or the most obvious choice for combining the short product cycles of the PC industry with the ease-of-use found in the consumer industry. Since Windows CE is not processor-dependent, there's no technical reason it couldn't run on Nuon chips or proprietary processors--only political ones. While Sony, Matsushita, Hitachi, Philips, and Thomson have all licensed the operating system, that doesn't mean they'll use it across all product lines, or that they intend to use it at all. Rather, it's a form of insurance, of hedging bets, and a handy tool to have licensed for potential service providers who insist on CE. And if all else fails, there's always Windows CE to reluctantly fall back on.