[opendtv] OCAP - will it continue to move forward
- From: "GerryK" <gerryk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 09:45:12 -0700
I've spoken with some of the Chief Technology Officers at the
major Cable MSOs and they are committed to developing OCAP
because they believe that it will make a lot of their future applications
more portable -
if you consider that the FCC and Congress will eventually
permit "yet another wave" of industry consolidation, OCAP has some
long term advantages. When two or three giant Cable companies are
all that are left standing, it will be to their
great benefit to have all their interactive applications
running on a unified, portable format -
I've also spoken with many software development engineers that
state that the development of OCAP is probably the single largest
software undertaking in history, and that the investments needed
could never be re-couped afterward, so in their opinion
OCAP will be one of those "holy grail" initiatives that never
come to fruition -
these software people point to TRON, the Japanese operating system
that was supposed to displace Microsoft's Windows in the Asian region,
as well as become the operating system for all the new Consumer Electronics
products - but TRON was too big on an undertaking, and never came out of the
lab
all that being said, if OCAP eventually accepts Microsoft's offer to
include the "dot NET" framework, then a combination of
Microsoft developers working on one track
and the JAVA OCAP people working on another track
we might see some interesting applications begin to appear that
can claim that they are OCAP compatible, but without the kind of
universal portability that the "holy grail" version of OCAP claims to
provide.
Anyway, as long as OCAP is on the table, there should be plenty of
interesting developments that come from the various developer communities
and some of these developments may worm their way into general distribution
so it's probably worth the effort right now to continue working on OCAP
a company in the Portland, Oregon, area called
Ensequence provides software that "interprets"
interactive TV instructions, and maps them onto the
specific capabilities of each model of set top box
for either digital Cable or digital satellite TV service.
With the Ensequence approach, a lot of interactive TV features
can be programmed one time by the "content provider" and
then the Ensequence product automatically makes the
interactive TV features work as best they can on each
model of set top box - so it's sort of like an advanced
preview of the kind of universal interoperability that a
"holy grail" version of OCAP might deliver -
contact: Jessie Dawes
Marketing Communications Manager
Ensequence
111 SW 5th Avenue, Suite 1400
Portland, Oregon 97204
503.416.3867
www.ensequence.com
Gerry Kaufhold with In-Stat/MDR
e-mail: gkaufhold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig Birkmaier" <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 9:12 AM
Subject: [opendtv] Re: Two-way plug-&-play
> At 11:45 PM -0700 10/11/04, Bill Sheppard wrote:
>>Sorry, I should have qualified that as "most new sets" will be OCAP
>>compliant. Of course it'll take time before it's a meaningful chunk of
>>the installed base, but even a few million sets, coupled with OCAP boxes
>>deployed by the cable companies, will be enough to get the content
>>flowing.
>>
>
> Do you seriously believe that OCAP is going to emerge as the basis
> for interactive television?
>
> I see no evidence of this ANYWHERE in the world (i.e. MHP is not
> creating much of a splash in Europe). And DASE is a total joke.
>
> It seems that the CE guys (and major content distributors like cable
> MSOs) continue to believe that they can overcome the inertia of the
> software tools that are emerging from the Internet and PC platforms.
>
> As consumers (continue) to migrate to progressive display
> technologies, the barriers to real convergence are crumbling. It's
> ludicrous to believe that an industry (even one as powerful as the TV
> industry) can control the evolutionary path of digital media
> technologies, especially when they continue to firmly grasp a failing
> (but still profitable) business model.
>
> Talk about a pipedream!
>
> Regards
> Craig
>
>
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