Japan looks to claim home ground with e-platform

Japan looks to claim home ground with e-platform
MAKUHARI, Japan — Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers are hoping a set-top-box architecture they are calling an "e-platform" will be the recipe for the rebirth of digital TV. A half-dozen of the biggest names in an industry groping for new business models, services and platforms lifted the lid this past week on "ep," with the lofty goal of ultimately turning the box into a platform for home gateway systems and home servers.

Japan's e-platform, and a startup company to broadcast data services for it, were launched at the Ceatec consumer show here by Hitachi, JVC, Matsushita, Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba. They and other partners backing the platform claimed that ep Corp. will offer the first service in the world to seamlessly combine digital broadcasting, Internet access and data storage in a hard-disk drive.

Toshiki Yasuda, manager of digital and network business planning at JVC, called ep "an attempt by the Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers to reestablish TV and reclaim its rights within the home, against the PC industry."

However, not every engineer — even within the group of backing companies — is betting the ranch on the e-platform, thus creating an air of confusion around the enterprise. "Consumer electronics manufacturers today don't know what consumer systems they ought to design," said Hisahi Yamada, chief fellow of technology at Toshiba Corp.'s digital media network company.

Mix and math

Perhaps for that reason, companies demonstrated on the show floor a slew of digital "combo" products that mixed and matched ingredients of existing consumer boxes. Among them were a DVD-R/RAM recorder combined with a hard-disk drive; a DVD player integrated with hard drive and Internet connectivity; a satellite decoder with hard drive and VCR; and a personal LCD TV with hard drive that handles DVD playback and Internet connectivity.

Under the hood, the architecture of all these products veers toward that of a PC. But beyond that the comparisons stop. Even boxes developed within the same company often use different operating systems, and the products do not share a common application programming interface or reuse much existing software. All deploy beefy but disparate processors, and are designed to receive and play back incompatible services and applications.

The e-platform was designed to resolve some, if not all, of this rampant incompatibility. By defining a clear hardware specification, called eSTB, for ep set-top boxes, Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers are laying out all the key elements of an e-platform architecture that supports common file systems, APIs and memory within constrained system resources.

The e-platform's minimum specifications call for the integration of two digital satellite receiver tuners, a 40-Gbyte hard-disk drive (with a minimum of 20 Gbytes set aside for "ep" services) and Internet connectivity. Besides decoding regular digital satellite broadcast programs, ep is designed to receive and store, in its HDD, interactive "ep" data services and applications developed using Japan's homegrown Broadcast Markup Language.

"Ep is a platform that allows us to embed new services in our products," Kunio Nakamura, president of Matsushita Industrial Electric Co., said during his keynote speech here. "Eventually, all the consumer electronics products with network accessibility will be connected to the ep network."

Ep has a broadcast affiliate, ep Broadcasting Corp., which will broadcast data entrusted by service providers. The ep data is directly and automatically downloaded into the set-top's hard drive in a defined providers' area. Users can watch, record and play digital TV programs using a separate, so-called users' area of the HDD. One push of the "ep" button shows related data stored in the provider area.

When ep Corp. begins its service next spring, it will collect fees from consumers and also charge service providers to use the platform. Company president Chosaku Toda said ep Corp. hopes to offer consumers the ep terminal for around $835. The goal is to sell 1 million units in the first 18 months, he said.

Hoping for success

Some industry watchers are of the opinion that by jointly founding and investing in ep Corp., Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers are hoping to re-create NTT Docomo's success with its I-mode Internet service, by capturing a new revenue stream generated from "ep" services and "ep" applications.

Critics, however, questioned whether this prospect is realistic, even with the combined might of the consumer giants and partners from various industries. Aside from an architectural definition, success would entail the building of cost-effective boxes, pinpointing useful services and creating compelling interactive content.

The conspicuous absence of Sony Corp. from the industry-wide ep promotion also worries some. Originally, Matsushita, Toshiba and Sony planned the e-platform together.

But after the completion of a technical draft detailing the basic specifications of data transmission and storage, which is now before Japan's Association of Radio Industries and Businesses for standardization, Sony dropped out. (The company still holds a 4.5 percent share of ep Corp., however.) Sony may be planning to debut its own proprietary services, one industry source speculated.

Aside from ep, the big news at Ceatec was digital combo products. Some of the introductions use PC operating systems, but generally, the Japanese consumer electronics industry's resistance to the PC platform as a basis for their products remains strong.

Security concerns

Toshiba's Yamada said the lack of a security system in the PC architecture is the biggest roadblock for migration to the home. "Content owners do not trust PCs, because once their data traverses a PC's PCI bus, they fear that it can be easily distributed over the Internet," he said.

The issue of copy protection is driving many manufacturers to develop sealed digital combo boxes, such as a DVD recorder integrated with a hard drive. For example, there is no means available today to communicate between a standalone digital set-top and a standalone DVD recorder; no method is provided to include copy control information (such as "copy," "copy one generation" and "no copy") defined by content owners for their copyrighted digital material. By putting a hard drive and a DVD recorder in a sealed box, a digital movie marked "copy one generation," for example, can be first downloaded into the HDD and then recorded onto a DVD disk, while the original movie stored in HDD will be automatically erased.

Similarly, ep proponents too are hoping to persuade owners of copyrighted materials that ep is a secure system that confines digital content in the eSTB hardware. The eSTB has an SD Card slot, but no writing capability, according to an engineer involved in ep development. But in the future, when the distribution of music or game content starts, the content will need to be copied to player equipment.

Ep Corp. will decide by 2003 on further service specifications, including copy protection for distributed video, music and other content, said company president Toda.

Operating systems used in the host of digital combo boxes that rolled out at Ceatec range from micro I-Tron, Linux and embedded Linux, and VxWorks to Windows ME, Windows 2000 and homegrown kernels.

Hitachi Ltd., for example, has a family of products called Prius decks that combine an LCD, TV tuner, DVD-RAM/DVD-R, CD-ROM/R and hard drive. Prius runs Windows ME on a Pentium III. Hitachi also showed at Ceatec what it calls a "home media deck," integrating a 40-Gbyte HDD, DVD player, MPEG-2 encoder/decoder and Internet connectivity. It runs Linux on Intel's Celeron processor.

The same company is developing an e-platform set-top with two digital satellite tuners, more than 40 Gbytes of disk storage and Internet connectivity. Built around Hitachi's SH processor, it will run the company's proprietary real-time kernel.

In architecting all these combo products, "It's not easy to draw a line between a PC and an embedded system," said Tomishige Yatsugi, an engineer at Hitachi's digital video systems-engineering department. "Oftentimes, we fall into the pitfall of developing products that are neither here or there."