Smartness Comes to Dishes and Disc Players

by Stephen Muratore
June 2000

For the past couple of years the computer and television industries have bubbled with talk of their "convergence": the marriage of moving pictures and sound with Internet-style selectivity and interactivity. If money talks, this has been more than just chatter: millions have been invested in the technologies that would tie the knot between the electronic bride and groom. Major players from both families have been scurrying in a frenzy of pre-nuptial preparations. Were it not so, for example, there would be no Smart TV Magazine.

However, this talk might just as well have been idle gossip for all it meant to the average recliner spud. If convergence meant hooking up a five-grand computer to one’s TV, convergence was going to have to happen in someone else’s living room. On the other hand, if convergence meant hooking up a $100 box to one’s TV in order to discover that Web pages, when readable, are boring and hard to navigate from a distance of 10 feet, then this multi-million dollar marriage might as well start the divorce proceedings. Truth to tell, the guy and gal on the couch couldn’t care less about the mega-marriage itself: rather, they’ve been waiting passively to see some robust offspring from the union. They’ve been waiting for actual products that actually do something interesting.

The time has come, with January 2000’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), to sit up and take notice. With the advent of the new year the progeny of convergence have started to arrive. And these products delivering a new kind of television are not living room computers, nor are they simply Web-surfing devices. Rather, they are a couple of devices that have taken living rooms by storm the last few years: satellite receivers and DVD players. But this is a new generation of dishes and disc players: these conceal silicon power, modems, browsers and data decoders under their hoods.

Smart Dishes

With the release of the DishPlayer 500 (see the review on page 20 of this issue) EchoStar/Dish Networks took the lead in aggregating a number of interaction- and choice-enabling features in a satellite receiver. This unit uses WebTV software and a hard drive to deliver, e-mail and Web access, but more importantly, a bevy of features that change the television experience itself. The DishPlayer sports an electronic program guide (EPG) that encompasses a whole week’s programming and makes it searchable by category, title, actor’s name or any other keyword or phrase. It enables the user to record favorite shows by highlighting an item in the EPG and clicking a remote button. The listings in the EPG contain hyperlinks to a show’s companion Web site when it has one, making it easy to call up a program and its Web site in fairly quick succession; or, alternately to program the unit to record a program and bookmark its Web site for later viewing.

The DishPlayer also allows the user to pause, fast forward and rewind live programs and those stored on its hard drive in the fashion of RePlay TV and TiVo digital video recorders.

Finally, the DishPlayer decodes ATVEF-standard data enhancements which provide various kinds of information and hyperlinks within the same frame as the television program. These change with the program and allow the viewer to interact with it as it progresses. (See the Interactive TV column in this issue for descriptions of programs using this technology today.)

One black box does not a groundswell make. The good news for satellite customers is that the DishPlayer has company, and will have more later this year. Back in July, Dish Networks itself announced that its lower-priced models 3800 and 4700 series satellite receivers would also deliver interactivity by way of OpenTV software. This also promised, "...e-commerce, music information, customer-care assistance, and other interactive services," according to the press release. As the OpenTV deployment does not require a hard drive in the receiver, Dish Networks plans to use it to deliver interactivity to its budget-minded subscribers.

Following Dish’s lead, its main competitor, DirecTV promisesin partnership with manufacturers Thomson/RCA, Sony and Hughes to field its own smart receivers in the second quarter of this year. At CES it showed no less than three different receivers in this category. At the low end, it showed an iWink receiver, with software by Wink that promises to deliver TV e-commerce and other interactive features. It also showed a TiVo receiver with all of TiVo’s hard-drive-based choice-engendering features and VCR functionality. Finally, DirecTV announced a partnership with AOLTV that will result in an AOLTV DirecTV receiver, made by Philips. This latter is slated to feature an EPG, the AOLTV channels, a Web browser, chat and a USB port. Further, DirecTV representatives said it will decode ATVEF enhancements and allow for software downloads. In other words, the AOLTV receiver seems meant to compete directly with the DishPlayer. One rep. indicated that the second-generation AOLTV box would carry a DSL connection, as will, we expect, a second-generation DishPlayer.

DBS satellite services have boomed in popularity over the past three years. Now interactive television, long a dream of futurists, seems poised to arrive in many homes by simple upgrades to the receivers for these services. And the black box that has surpassed even DBS in its rate of consumer acceptance has just begun to show us what it can deliver when injected with interactive DNA. We speak now of the DVD player.

Interactive DVD Players

Though our Buyer’s Guide this issue shows a wide range of DVD players, let us dwell here on those slated for this year that increase the interactivity of this medium. Once upon a time Smart TV reported a technology called "Blackbird." Then it was to become "Project X." Finally, it morphed into "NUON." This is a technology, largely developed by Motorola, that promised to combine the functions of a browser, an MPEG decoder, a modem and more in an inexpensive chipset. We reported that this technology would first be deployed in DVD players and that these DVD players would sport interactive features not currently found on standard DVD players. Still, even two years after the first reports, NUON DVD players have yet to appear in the U.S. market, though Motorola has had its Stream Master model in Europe for months. Rumors of the "death" of NUON were widespread, but apparently exaggerated. In January Samsung, Toshiba and Raite all announced their intentions of bringing NUON-enabled DVD players to this market this year.

At CES Samsung and Toshiba showed prototype units that held advanced Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)which are customizable by individual manufacturersand were capable of selecting alternate camera angles, lossless zoom, playing tracks for director’s commentary, smooth reverse and fast forward, picture indexing of scenes, e-mail, and Web browsing. Samsung’s NUON player (model DVD-N2000) ran Virtual Light Machine, image-creation software, while playing an audio CD. This created abstract colors and shapes in accordance with various properties of the music played: very 60s, but fun. When it comes to fancy Web pages, NUON chips support animated GIFs, JAVAScript™, JPEG, GIF and Macromedia Flash™. Perhaps most interactive of all are the NUON DVD players’ ability to play interactive games, even networked games, and to pull in Web-hosted content to enhance the content on video or game discs.

Obviously, manufacturers supporting the NUON standard hope that content authors will write for the platform, else these players will never be able to strut their stuff. The very popular Myst already has a NUON DVD version, as do games such as Tempest 3000 and aMaze. Samsung announced plans to ship its first unit with half a dozen game discs written for the format. These should give NUON consumers a taste of their capabilities. For more information on the technology, endorsements, screen shots of some software becoming available and related product announcements, visit the Web site at www.nuon-tech.com.

On other fronts, MindSpring recently announced that it will bring its own interactive DVD (iDVD) technology to market. Similarly, it is rumored that Microsoft has a game console in development, currently dubbed the X-Box, that is essentially an enhanced DVD player. Finally, Dish Networks has introduced a ground-breaking product of yet another kind: a single unit that combines a DVD player with a satellite tuner.

DVD Recorder/Players

If NUON and other technologies have begun to add the smarts of interactivity to a new generation of DVD players, recordability will begin to add the smarts of selectivity to them by the end of this year. Certainly, machines that enable users to create customized video collections, record them to optical disc and index them, the way MP3 "juke boxes" currently do for audio collections, will make a strong contribution toward a smartened TV viewing experience.

While JVC and others seem content to sit by until a single recordable DVD standard is accepted universally, Philips, Sharp and Thomson/RCA all announced that they would bring DVD player/recorders to market late this year. They promise that discs recorded in their units will play in players of any of the variations of recordable DVD, made by any of the manufacturers. Watch the marketplace toward the end of the year for these, but if price is an object for you don’t expect to pick one up for Christmas. Manufacturers thus far are tight-lipped when asked about pricing, but many speculate the first units will sell for about $5,000.

The Year of the Smarts

The transformation of TV to smart TV has begun in earnest. The two hottest categories of consumer electronics products of the past three years have begun adding features which enhance interactivity and enable viewer choice. Satellite tuners and DVD players are now driving the change. As cable TV companies come to join the fray with interactive cable boxes (software by companies such as Wink, OpenTV, TiVo, RePlay and others), the market could morph rapidly. Interactivity will move quickly from a high tech novelty for PC/TV enthusiasts to the standard way everyone comes to enjoy TV. We may come to look back upon the current year as a turning point in the history of television: the year the convergence became real.

Stephen Muratore is Smart TV's Editor in Chief.