American
Cable Adopts Europe's iTV Standard
by Ken
Freed.
.
After
investigation for compatability with OpenCable systems,
MHP adoption means American producers of interactive
TVconent may create once for whole world.
A
milestone in the U.S. interactive TV business passed with
scant notice as CableLabs on November 13 announced that
future retail OpenCable digital set-top boxes built and
sold in the United States will need to follow the
Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) middleware standard,
developed in Europe for interactive Digital Video
Broadcasting (DVB).
Treated by most of
the U.S. news trades as a small technical specification
story, coverage of OpenCable-MHP in the States will
increase once the cable industry sees if DVB-MHP can
bring down costs for set-top boxes. And cable interest
will grow as EchoStar's DVB-based Dish Network starts
broadcasting MHP content from OpenTV over satellites
above the States. Then watch what happens once Hollywood
awakens to the full revenue implications of global
distribution of MHP-based interactive television content
produced in America.
Is the smart bet on
America's TV trade reading between a few headlines?
To appreciate the
creative and financial potential, understand the basics
of MHP. The MHP software application programming
interface (API) was created as the open middleware
standard for all interactive TV (iTV) applications
operating on Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) platforms,
especially satellite, cable, and digital terrestrial
transmission systems. All MHP signatories gain access to
an innovative intellectual property licensing pool that
allows for regional variations in
implementation.
Integrating a
common API with the Java programming language, licensed
from Sun Microsystems, MHP supports a standard hardware
interface, so iTV content can be displayed on all DVB-MHP
set-top boxes, integrated digital TV sets, multimedia
computers, and DVD players. The specification includes an
MHP test suite for conformance testing. With three
million Java programmers around the globe, the MHP
development base could be vast.
MHP engineering
development was coordinated through the Geneva offices of
the DVB Project, a consortium of 730 media organizations
from 51 countries on five continents, including the
United States. MHP was ratified in 2000 by the DVB
Steering Board and adopted by the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
DVB-MHP is already
an international hit. OpenTV and Matsushita are
collaborating on DVB-MHP technologies for BSkyB in the UK
and the European market. Finland has deployed an MHP
digital terrestrial system. In Germany, MHP has been
embraced RTL and the Kirch Group along with Germany's
public TV broadcasters. This list of MHP backers
worldwide seems to grow weekly.
Other MHP
Implementers Group members include Bertelsmann, Canal+,
Deutsche Telekom, Fantastic Corporation, Grundig, IRT,
Mediagate, Nokia, NTL, OpenTV, ORF, Panasonic, Philips,
Pioneer, PowerTV, RAI, Sharp, Samsung, SES/Astra,
Scientific Atlanta, Sony, Sun, Thomcast, YLE, and ZDF.
DVB Chairman Theo
Peek said there may be "regional differences" in the
American MHP implementation that vary from deployments
elsewhere in the world, "but the core of the
specification is the same."
American adoption
of MHP does not mean U.S. cable boxes will be usable or
salable in Europe, at least, not at this juncture, but
it's a good step toward global iTV standardisation.
.
America's Road
to MHP
Unlike Europe and
other DVB countries, the U.S. cable industry has never
before had a common API middleware for iTV programming.
U.S. cable is
required under the 1996 Telecommunications Act to develop
a national digital set-top box that can be sold in one
place and used anyplace else in the country, just like
satellite receiver boxes. CableLabs then began the
process of developing the OpenCable standards for these
boxes.
Movement toward MHP
traces back to summer 1999 when CableLabs issued a
request for proposals (RFP) to provide interoperable
software on OpenCable set-top boxes. That initiative did
gain steam until May 2000 when the Society of Cable
Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) formed the Cable
Applications Platform (CAP) Subcommittee, its stated goal
to make U.S. cable boxes compatible with the world
DVB-MHP standard for iTV.
Said CAP
subcommittee chair Jean-Pol Zundel, the chief software
architect for Comcast Cable, "The committee was formed to
explore the need for SCTE involvement in channeling the
OpenCable process toward having one set of standard APIs
for all interactive TV applications on the
set-top-box."
As then conceived,
he said, the OpenCable middleware standard would have
featured an ATVEF-friendly presentation engine (PE)
running HTML or JavaScript in tandem with an execution
engine (EE) running pure Java and the Java-TV APIs
developed by the DVB-MHP body. The bridge between the two
engines was to be a Document Object Model (DOM), so the
Java engine could access all the HTML and JavaScript
objects.
CableLabs took
another major step toward MHP in September 2000, as
reported in this column, by announcing that Sun, Liberate
and Microsoft would be the primary authors of the new
OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP), the middleware
software specification being developed as the U.S.
equivalent to MHP, modeled on its API.
Sun agreed to
license Java and JavaTV for the execution engine (EE) of
the OCAP API, while Liberate and Microsoft were
developing an ATVEF based presentation engine (PE), like
a Web browser using the standard Web markup and scripting
languages like HTML and ECMAScript (JavaScript).
"We are
purposefully trying to find where our approach can
overlap the DVB-MHP developments," at the time said Don
Dulchinos, VP of advanced platforms and services at
CableLabs, "but MHP will not be a formal part of OCAP."
He said then that there might be some Java-based
applications that run on both OpenCable and MHP
platforms, "but I don't think there will ever be one
global standard for interactive television
content."
What a difference a
year makes. Formal adoption of MHP for OpenCable pleases
American iTV developers who have privately voice
frustration over any split between the DVB-MHP and
OpenCable on middleware standards.
CableLabs announced
specifically that cable operators in North America have
agreed to adopt and implement the bulk of MHP 1.0.1 and
MHP1.1, which now supports the XML and HTML 4.0
protocols. HTML is favored by the Microsoft-backed ATVEF
movement for enhanced TV. Down the road will come support
for MPEG4, which enables advanced interactive
video.
One American press
analyst who did not miss the OpenCable- MHP announcement
was Leslie Ellis, who noted MHP's inclusion of the Java
Virtual Machine (JVM), which allows Java programmers to
redirect the capacity of set-top chipsets to other
functions than originally intended. With JVM as the
engine running OpenCable-MHP applications, she suggested,
"suddenly there's a path toward moving the
[programme] guide, or any other application, on
top of the JVM."
.
MHP to the
Rescue
A growing number of
U.S. ITV players have privately expressed to this
reporter in the past year their growing exasperation over
the ongoing lack of any middleware standard in America.
Historically, the
U.S. cable industry tacitly decided to follow the
Microsoft Windows model of standard-setting: Rule the
market, then set the market rules. No one middleware
vendor has been able to gain an upper hand in the U.S.,
however, but not for lack of trying, and the situation
has grown untenable with satellite making strong market
advances against cable in signing up new digital
subscribers.
The irony here, of
course, is that a middleware layer in the cable box stack
software was invented to resolve ongoing delays from
competition between the proprietary iTV operating
systems. Well, now each proprietary middleware vendor can
ride atop all the major proprietary OS vendors, but the
critical problem of interoperability was not yet been
solved. The battle was simply transferred to the
middleware arena, and the crucial contest in Americas has
remained unsettled until CableLabs decided to go with
MHP.
A global iTV
standard appeals to American iTV content creators, who
have long wanted the ability to create a programme once
and have it play everywhere in the world. Instead,
they've had to choose a primary venue among the
proprietary middleware platforms &endash; OpenTV,
PowerTV, Liberate, Microsoft, Canal+ &endash; and then
create multiple versions of everything they produced,
like having to do separate versions of spreadsheet
software for the Macintosh and the PC, multiplied by
five. The requirement to replicate reproduction costs has
kept plenty of creative minds from developing iTV
content.
"Content owners
naturally would love to see one universal interactive TV
content standard," has said Arthur Orduna, marketing VP
for Canal+ U.S. Technologies, "but for that to happen,
the content itself must drive the evolution of a global
standard. Persuading all elements in the value chain --
content creators, network operators, equipment
manufacturers -- that it's in their own best interest to
adopt one global standard is not going to be
easy."
Such persuasion
must have taken place, or else the politically savvy
Cablelabs leadership would never have agreed to go with
MHP.
.
Things to
Come
"The OCAP
specification has been based on MHP from the start," said
Dr. Richard R. Green, President and CEO of CableLabs,
"but we now have a more formal agreement to plan and
coordinate current and future development of the MHP and
OCAP specifications, as well as the implementation and
testing of the compliant products." The agreement with
DVB coordinating MHP usage in North America, he promised
"will enable us to complete and publish OCAP
specifications within 75 days." That's the end of January
2002.
As a sign of things
to comes, a few days after the CableLabs announcement,
Sun announced a deal with six companies (Agency.com,
Alticast, Kasenna, N2 Broadband, Strategy &
Technology, VideoPropulsion) to develop the "Sun Media
Appliance." The server software with a common API will
support cable headends broadcasting open-standards
Java-based middleware, including DVB MHP, delivering VOD
and other interactive applications. Configurations for
content developer and broadcast environments are
available now, with a media-on-demand configuration
expected by summer 2002.
SnapTwo.com
announced its Snap2 Gear application development toolset
for DVB-MHP will include an OCAP version, once the final
standard is published by CableLabs. Separately, Espial
released a DVB-MHP-compliant interactive TV development
tools suite written in Java especially for the set-top
box market. Look for more news along this
line.
Also indicative,
Motorola in October announced plans to use OpenTV's MHP
compatible middleware for the DVi4000 set-top boxes being
built for European customers, and these boxes now might
be sold stateside. Motorola's American customers for the
advanced DCT 5000 box with the Liberate or Microsoft TV
middleware include AT&T, Media One, and Charter
Communications. AOL Time Warner is a customer of PowerTV,
which has a Java license. Liberate recently announced
that its TV Navigator client software is now certified as
Java compliant, which means easier migration into MHP
compliance.
"The biggest hurdle
is bringing down the cost of the advanced boxes
themselves," Dulchinos said. "Success depend on what the
vendors and the operators are willing to
invest."
Expressing doubts
about MHP's cost-effectiveness is US-based Liberty Media,
planning to distribute boxes with its own proprietary
technology on the systems bought in Germany, meanwhile
seeking German government approval for a $4.8 billion
purchase of Deutsche Telekom's cable properties. Liberty
may start with VOD services on lower-end boxes to
forestall a decision on MHP.
But Liberty may not
have the luxury of time. In the same last week as the
OpenCable-MHP announcement, Kirch, RTL and Germany's
public broadcasters complained to the government's cartel
office about Liberty using proprietary middleware instead
of MHP.
In a classic case
of global interactivity, CableLabs' MHP decision adds
weight to the German government's likely assertion of MHP
as the national iTV standard. Given the near
inevitability of Liberty adopting MHP in Europe, that
choice will encourage MHP deployment by globally aware
cable operators in America.
Do a reality check.
At this moment, there are no certified OpenCable boxes or
integrated television sets in American retail stores.
Members of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)
have no active plans for training local retailers on how
to sell the cable boxes. CE retailers contacted
informally in the Denver area were only vaguely aware
that digital cable boxes were supposed to be in their
stores more than a year ago.
Given cable
operator's natural preference for the proven business
model of renting boxes locally rather than the unproven
business model of selling boxes nationally like the
satellite operators, unless prodded by the government,
will retail OpenCable boxes ever enter stores in America?
If the political will never forms to implement OpenCable
for all digital cable boxes in America, both retail and
rental, then OpenCable-MHP may indeed be a small story.
.
