Scientific Atlanta enters retail sales - company to sell set-top boxes over Internet - Brief Article

Electronics Times, Oct 23, 2000

Cable TV giant Scientific Atlanta is preparing to sell its set-top boxes over the Internet into the retail market for the first time, and is looking at licensing software for boxes for the multimedia home platform (MHP).

Tony Wasilewski, chief scientist, said: "We are ready to go into retail today. The FCC [the regulator in the US] says that consumers have to have the opportunity to own the receivers and we could do that, possibly by selling the boxes over our website. But we don't see a big demand for that."

Traditionally a proprietary network supplier, Scientific Atlanta is also looking at developing MHP boxes, possibly by licensing key software from outside.

"For Europe, we will have MHP boxes as we already have the Java execution engine. But there may be interesting European companies that handle the MHP stack that goes with it that we need to be able to license and avoid doubling our efforts," said Wasilewski.

"But it depends on the licence fee, otherwise we will build the stack. But it will probably take us longer because we are resource- constrained. If we had to ship today, we would not have an MHP solution to ship.

"We saw the first demonstrations of MHP boxes at the IBC show in September, add another year to make them products, and I think it will be in Q4 of next year."

The next Explorer box, the 8000, will add a SH4 chip from Hitachi to run the MicrosoftTV operating system and applications, "when MicrosoftTV is here properly. It isn't here yet,' he said.

This will be an option for the current high-end box, the 6000, as well. It will also have a `2.5D' graphics engine to add lighting and shadowing to 2D images. It comes from a video games company, says Wasilewski.

Copyright: United Business Media Ltd.