MediaOne broadens set-top market: Operator will look to Europe for digital box

In a move that may open the U.S. digital set-top market to new competition, MediaOne officials said last week that it would deploy set-top boxes produced by a partnership among Philips Electronics and two other suppliers in one of its two 1999 digital cable rollouts.

One trial, in unnamed markets, will deploy set-top boxes manufactured by Philips using an open software platform from Canal + Technologies and digital headends from DiviCom Inc., MediaOne officials said.

The choice makes MediaOne the first U.S. cable company to select an open conditional access system-widely used in Europe-over the closely held licensed system for key-sharing used by American set-top makers General Instrument and Scientific-Atlanta.

"This will allow us to choose among six to 12 different conditional access mechanisms that could either reside singly in our plant or coexist with one another," said Joe Wetzel, MediaOne's vice president for technology. "We're changing from the world where you pick General Instrument or Scientific-Atlanta and stay with them, to one where we can change conditional access based on the needs of the business."

Heightened competition in the set-top arena will get MediaOne digital service to consumers faster and cheaper, Wetzel said.

It also will further the OpenCable effort to achieve interoperability-an effort that has seemed at times to move slowly.

"Open Cable is coming together pretty well," Wetzel said. "But what we're doing commercially will add some teeth to the specification and certification process."

GI, which supplied set-top equipment for MediaOne's first digital rollout in the Detroit area last year, will participate in the second deployment this year. The company also has agreed to work with the Philips/Canal +/DiviCom alliance to migrate its software platform and integrate some access features of the Philips set-top.

Denton Kanouff, marketing vice president for digital services, said GI already includes open conditional access in the European version of its product and will add them to fashion a custom product for MediaOne.

But Wetzel asserted that the new GI set-top will be "a core product for them-not exclusively a MediaOne endeavor."

MediaOne expects to see other suppliers sign up this year, Wetzel added. "Philips, Pioneer, Pace, Sony-they all make compatible set-tops. So we could easily add or drop suppliers from our list and still maintain the standard set of interfaces."