New Chip Brings the Cable Future Closer : Television: Silicon Valley start-up’s breakthrough in video data compression a big step toward 500 channels.
A Silicon Valley start-up has developed a way to compress video images faster, cheaper and with greater fidelity than ever before, bringing the much-heralded 500-channel future a big step closer to America’s doorsteps.
The notion of an information highway offering a vast array of video on demand depends largely on the ability to compress massive amounts of data so that six or more digital channels can be transmitted in the place of one analog channel. But even as the cable and phone companies feverishly roll out fiber-optic lines and pursue alliances with movie studios and television producers to gain access to programming, compression technology remains in its infancy.
To digitize and compress a two-hour movie, for example, can take up to two days. But for digital television to actually work, program providers must be able to record a football game, digitize it, compress it and transmit it, all in “real time,” meaning right now.
C-Cube Microsystems of Milpitas, Calif., has invented a chip to do just that. The C-Cube chip, which will conform to the so-called MPEG 2 standard being hammered out by an international consortium of communications engineers, will provide compression on the fly at broadcast quality for the first time, the company said Thursday.
“It’s an enabling event,” said Andrew Kessler, managing director of the Unterberg Harris investment firm in San Francisco. “It’s going to change the economics of the cable industry, just like the microprocessor changed the economics of the computer business.”
Perfecting video compression has been C-Cube’s Holy Grail since the company’s inception five years ago. “It’s the only thing we’ve ever done,” said Alex Balkanski, sales and marketing vice president and a C-Cube founder. “And we were able to get it done before any of the big boys.”
The competition is coming: General Instruments, which already manufactures a real-time video compression encoder, is working on a new product that will allow for better picture quality at lower cost.
And major semiconductor companies such as Motorola, Toshiba and NEC are expected to join the fray. But for now, C-Cube has been able to line up some big boys of its own as customers for its new technology.
Scientific Atlanta will build an encoding system around the chip, which it plans to market to cable operators, program providers and advertising agencies so they can distribute and store their programming digitally.
Scientific Atlanta, which makes the little TV-top boxes that decode cable signals, will also incorporate a C-Cube chip in its new generation of set-top boxes. In this case, the chip will decompress video compressed using C-Cube’s technology.
Time Warner is expected to use the C-Cube system in its Orlando, Fla., interactive television pilot next year. And Hughes DirecTV, a direct broadcast satellite system to be launched in December, will use the technology to offer up to 150 channels of video from a satellite with only 30 transponders (signal-reflecting devices)--a considerable increase in channel efficiency.
