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From...
Interactive TV wars heat up
November 10, 1998
Web posted at: 2:30 PM EDT
by Industry Standard staff
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(IDG) -- Truth be told, much of the Internet industry has been built on the graveyard of '80s experiments in interactive television. Well, it looks like interactive TV is back. This morning The Wall Street Journal and the LA Times ran stories about a new chip developed by Broadcom that can be used in set-top boxes to easily integrate Web and data content with video. And The New York Times ran a piece about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's pending investment in Replay Networks, a company that builds technology for interactive television.
Replay and Broadcom are working on different aspects of interactive TV technology - with Broadcom focusing on delivering Web content to television screens, and Replay focusing on a system for viewers to customize and control their television viewing experiences. Still the two pieces, taken together, draw a fascinating picture of the battle lines being drawn around convergence and set-top box development.
Fredrick Rose, in The Wall Street Journal, did a particularly nice job at the bottom of his piece, analyzing the race to provide interactive TV services, which has engaged not just chip makers but also cable companies, telecoms, traditional set-top box manufacturers and, of course, Microsoft.
"Interactive television has become a huge focus both for cable companies such as Tele-Communications Inc. and for technology concerns such as Microsoft," Rose noted. But the new Broadcom chip, taken together with another Broadcom product that loads all the needed circuitry for a cable-TV modem into a single chip, could catapalt the company ahead in the set-top box wars. "There are things out there that do some of what Broadcom's chip does," Cynthia Brumfield, an analyst at Paul Kagan Associates Inc., told The Journal. "But the Broadcom chip appears to refine all of this."