Standard may open field for new set-top players: software companies favor international approach - Technology

Cable Television Laboratories has finally released its interactive television standards, and cable operators and middleware providers are hailing the finished product as a major boost for the industry, even though it may need some tinkering.

The Open Cable Application Platform, or OCAP, is designed to allow interoperability of competing ITV applications as cable companies gear up for the next generation of services for their subscribers.

It should also open the floodgates to new set-top boxes, says CableLabs president and CEO Richard Green.

"This process gives the consumer-electronics community even more incentive to go full steam ahead into competitive manufacturing of set-top boxes and cable-friendly digital television receivers," Green said in a release.

The standards would be a step toward making set-tops a retail item, but whether consumers will want to buy boxes currently provided by their local cable company remains to be seen.

Executives from the six top multiple system operators endorsed OCAP 1.0, which is derived largely from the Java-based Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) developed by Europe's Digital Video Broadcasting Association, or DVB.

Liberate Technologies, which is a co-author of the specification, says Charlie Tritschler, VP-marketing for the company, is pleased with the results.

Adoption of European standards is a big plus for OCAP, Tritschler says.

"We're a worldwide company already today and are active on MHP as well," he says. "To spread those standards worldwide--so you don't have to reformat for the U.S.--it makes it so much easier for developers to create once and then push that worldwide."

OpenTV also played a major role in the development of the standards, and like Liberate, it already has an international presence. Vincent Dureau, OpenTV's CTO, said adoption of the European MHP standards would boost his company's ability to develop applications under OCAP.

Dureau says OCAP 1.0 should be viewed as a "merger" between U.S. and European standards rather than a triumph for one or the other.

"It's essentially a common interactive TV layer--common between MHP and CableLabs--over different networking layers, one being DVB-specific and one being Cable Labs-specific," he says.

But developers accustomed to MHP will likely uncover glitches that will have to be fixed down the road, he notes, in part because of the different networking standards.

"Some of the MHP standards need to be localized to the new CableLabs specifications, but we don't see any major problem down the line," Dureau says.

Now middleware developers need to start testing the compliance and interoperability of the new standards.

"We're already seeing there are ambiguities in the standards; there are different ways of reading the standards," Dureau says. "The industry needs to understand that while a lot of the work has been done, at the same time there's a lot of work ahead of us to reach true interoperability between different set-top boxes from different manufacturers on different networks."

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