Sun Microsystems and OpenTV Team For Next-Generation Digital Set-Top Box Design.SAN JOSE San Jose, city, United States San Jose (sănəzā`, săn hōzā`), city (1990 pop. 782,248), seat of Santa Clara co., W central Calif.; founded 1777, inc. 1850. , Calif. and PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 19, 1997-- Focused on expanding the volume of interactive television content introduced, Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA[3]) is an American vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information-technology services, founded on 24 February 1982. , Inc., and OpenTV today announced that they intend to work together to develop advanced set-top box The cable TV box that sits on "top" of the TV "set," although it is often located several feet away in an equipment rack. The set-top box descrambles the premium channels and provides a tuner for the higher cable numbers that very old TVs did not support. (STB See set-top box. STB - set-top box ) reference designs based on the OpenTV interactive TV operating environment In computing, an operating environment is the environment in which users run programs, whether in a command line interface, such as in MS-DOS or the Unix shell, or in a graphical user interface, such as in the Macintosh operating system. and Sun's microSPARC(TM) and JavaChip(TM) processors. The companies will collaborate on OpenTV's next-generation interactive television operating environment and will work together to provide a feature-rich upgrade path that provides optimal benefits to the OpenTV customer base. "We intend to develop multiple reference designs for satellite, cable and HDTV (High Definition TV) A set of digital television (DTV) standards that offer the highest resolution and sharpest picture. Although some HDTV sets are available in standard (rather square) screen sizes, the overwhelming majority of sets are wide screen, which eliminates while also supporting the many performance levels that digital services will demand," said Chet Silvestri, president of Sun Microelectronics, a division of Sun Microsystems, Inc. "We expect OpenTV and SPARC (Scalable Performance ARChitecture) A family of RISC CPUs from Sun that runs mostly under Sun's Solaris, but also under Linux and BSD operating systems. After development began in the mid-1980s by David Patterson of the University of California at Berkeley and Bill and JavaChip processors to open the door to the television becoming a portal to interactive program guides, home banking and shopping, interactive subscriber services, interactive advertising, educational programs, games and community services." SPARC and JavaChip processors and OpenTV STB reference designs will eventually leverage the community of Java(TM) application developers focused on the Internet and enable them to author applications for television distribution alongside existing OpenTV application developers. "In addition to expanding the pool of interactive content, inclusion of microSPARC and JavaChip processors in the OpenTV solution would greatly enhance our ability to deliver electronic-commerce applications that take advantage of Sun's technology running on databases and commerce servers worldwide," said Jan Steenkamp, chief executive officer of OpenTV. "We view this announcement as a positive development that will benefit efforts in creating an exciting range of new interactive television content that further leverages existing relationships with both Sun and Open TV," said Hans Brattberg, Technical Director, Telia InfoMedia Television AB. Sun's microSPARC-IIep microprocessor is a highly-integrated, high-performance microprocessor ideally suited for low-cost applications. The Sun JavaChip processor family consists of the picoJava(TM) core and the microJava(TM) microprocessor families, currently under development. The JavaChip family of processors will be optimized to directly execute Java applications, providing high-performance interaction while minimizing the set-top box memory footprint Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running. This includes all sorts of active memory regions like code, static data sections (both initialized and uninitialized), heap, as well as all the stacks, plus memory required to hold . About OpenTV OpenTV, Inc. is the leading software solution company engaged in providing all the key components for the development and delivery of interactive services and content to digital satellite, cable, terrestrial broadcast and other video delivery services worldwide. Working in partnership with the world's leading consumer electronics companies, chip-set vendors, pay television set-top box providers and conditional access system A conditional access system (CAS) is a system by which electronic transmission of digital media, especially satellite television signals through cable, is limited to subscribed clients. This is called conditional access. providers, OpenTV, Inc. provides the only truly open, digital platform for the rapid delivery and deployment of interactive television services and content. OpenTV, Inc. formerly known as Thomson Sun Interactive, is jointly owned by Myriad International Holdings (MIH MIH Make It Happen (band) MIH Master of International Health (University of Copenhagen) MIH Molar-Incisor-Hypomineralisation MIH Men in Hats (online comic) ), an international pay TV company that recently purchased a 44 percent stake in OpenTV; Thomson Multimedia, a leading consumer electronics company; and top computer networking
Computer networking is the engineering discipline concerned with communication between computer systems or devices. company, Sun Microsystems. OpenTV played a leading role in the launch of TPS's (la TELEvision Par Satellite) interactive services in France earlier this year and continues to be actively involved in the development and introduction of new applications. The TPS (1) (Transactions Per Second) The number of transactions processed within one second. TPS is a better rating for the performance of hardware and software than the common MHz and GHz rating of the computer. services currently have over 210,000 interactive television subscribers, making it the largest commercially operated system of its kind in the world. The company recently signed major agreements to provide its OpenTV software solution to British Interactive Broadcastings (BIB) interactive television services platform and to Japan's PerfecTV! OpenTV is also in the final stages of negotiation with leading television services in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Africa, the Middle East and the U.S. For more information, OpenTV can be reached on the World Wide Web at http://www.opentv.com . About Sun Microsystems Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun Logo, JavaChip, Java, picoJava, microJava, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. CONTACT: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Caroline Phillips, 408/544-0288 caroline.phillips@eng.sun.com or Bender, Goldman & Helper (for OpenTV) Alexis Hunter, 415/388-5587 ahunter222@aol.com |
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