by Janice J. Heiss

A Java TV^TM API Party

On Thursday afternoon, December 16, 1999, Sun Microsystems hosted a cocktail reception where over 100 Java TV API movers and shakers gathered on the 50th floor of the Bank of America Tower in downtown Los Angeles. There they were treated to a stunning panorama of the city from Santa Catalina to the Hollywood hills, and most importantly, exciting contemporary and future visions of the Java TV API.

A New Medium is on the Way

One message was clear: Television will never be the same. The move from analog to digital television will be gradual, but inevitable, and its implications, while ultimately unpredictable, will be vast. We are moving toward a world of 500 channels; Video-on-Demand (VOD); where viewers respond to commercials by buying products on the spot; a choice of several camera angles watching sporting events; higher quality video and audio; endless not-yet-imagined interactive possibilities; and -- as industry experts are quick to point out -- the important option of remaining passive and not interacting with your television.

The Challenges of Digital Television

George Paolini, VP of the Java Community Development for Sun Microsystems, pointed out that the information age has brought a wealth of information but a poverty of time. With more information comes more choices -- and less time to make those choices as our attention spans grow shorter and shorter. With remote controls and channel surfing, customer loyalty has become as fickle as the push of a button, presenting the television industry with formidable challenges. The days when NBC could predict, based on customer loyalty, its Today Show ratings by the popularity of the previous night's Carson Show are long gone.

Sun's George Paolini discusses the future of television

Digital television, Paolini pointed out, must grapple with a paradox. People watching television are choosing to be passive, yet digital television offers opportunities for active interaction and choice similar to a desktop pc experience. Digital TV can change the dynamic of television advertising by providing the viewer with enhanced shopping convenience. Television advertising currently relies on repetition that is intended to get a target audience to buy a product. URLs and 800 numbers are increasingly included in TV advertising, but advertisers still face the reality of the passive "couch potato," who may delay purchase decisions. Digital television can enable viewers to see an advertisement, click a button and get more information -- or even purchase goods and services on the spot.

Interactivity: Opportunity or Burden?

TV folk mingle at Sun's reception in Los Angeles

Viewers want more information and control from digital TV. Electronic programming guides are on the way, along with Video-On-Demand (VOD) -- enabling viewers to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it. Intertainer, a Sun partner relying on Java TV technology, has 50,000 hours of movies stored. "If you watched 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, it would take 12 years to watch all those movies," calculates Paolini.

A second area of control involves camera angles that allow viewers to watch sporting events from three or four different perspectives. Sports fans can choose to view a baseball game from the centerfielder's perspective, then switch over to second base, or watch the pitcher from behind home plate.

Community building is crucial to establishing customer loyalty, which is increasingly hard to come by. Paolini points to ARD, the German equivalent of Public Television, which has been running an interactive version of Candid Camera where viewers are invited to guess the reaction of unwitting participants, resulting in a heightened sense of community and strong customer loyalty. And the greatest return on investment of any movie in history was achieved by the Blair Witch Project, which generated a Web-based community for months before the movie opened.

Java TV^TM API Enters the Picture

How does Java TV technology fit into the digital television picture?

• It offers a complete software programming environment with the capability to program with the sophistication of a computer. The Java TV API enables functionality that can display information in a useable format that we are accustomed to on television.
• It provides flexibility for content, and the ability to interact with all the standard document and content formats -- flash, MPEG, and HTML, etc.

The Digital Video Broadcasting Project The DVB is a digital television standards body which includes over 250 well-known organizations in more than 30 countries worldwide. Members include manufacturers, network operators, and regulatory bodies, committed to designing a global family of standards for the delivery of digital television.

• It is standards-compliant and has been adopted as a standard by the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), centered in Europe. It will soon be adopted as a standard by the Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC), which focuses on the North American market.

"Why are Java technology's open standards important?" asks Paolini. "It is not about motherhood and apple pie. It's about good business sense. Think of the ability to tap into 2 million Java technology developers with all their sophistication and capability. It is about time to market and tapping into communities, agreeing on interfaces and competing on implementation. This is what standards bring to this new world."

Television -- A Huge Proposition

Kevin Hause of International Data Corporation (IDC) gave an overview of television in America.

• Almost all American households have televisions.
• 80% of American households have two or more.
• There are 250 million TVs in the US alone.
• 25 million are sold annually in the US, almost all analog.
• The average American household watches 50 hours of television a week. (Given that some households watch very little, others must watch TV 20 hours a day.)
• The average video bill for all services, from basic cable to high-end services, is $42 a month. The average household making under $25K a year still spends almost $30 per month.
• Over the next decade we can expect a slow but inevitable transition from analog to digital television.

"Once the foundation for interactive television is laid," said Hause, "the information services people should turn it over to the creative people and let them come up with compelling services, applications and contents that keep viewers coming back."

The Origins of Java TV^TM API

Sun's David Rivas explains Java TV technology

David Rivas, senior engineer and architect of the Java TV API for Sun, pointed out that Java technology was originally intended in the mid-nineties for set-top boxes, and interactive VOD, but its application to the skyrocketing Internet took precedence and Java technology became a household word. Then, in 1997, a collection of content vendors, network providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and standards organizations came to Sun and said that the world was ready for a TV platform based on Java technology.

"We were caught up in the excitement of the Internet, but we started listening carefully to the things they were telling us," observed Rivas. "They wanted a platform for content developers to write exciting new content, content that took advantage of some of the unique aspects of this environment. This was not the Internet. This was a high bandwidth pipe with extremely high quality, high production value content already being developed for it, and a collection of engaged viewers."

Before Java technology could be applied to television, several things had to happen. Given the expense of creating content, vendors had to be assured of interoperability amongst receivers when they were developing content. And the functionality had to meet the bar for any existing interactive television experience. In addition, the functionality of the receiver had to scale over time.

"Extensibility to a wide variety of appliances was important, and so was the extensibility that content authors pushed," noted Rivas. "When they started developing content for the Internet, HTML-like environments were great. But soon you had browser developers and content providers creating plug-ins. One thing we bring with the Java environment is the ability to deploy the Java platform with a collection of plug-ins. It is a platform that is capable of being upgraded by the content itself, with new plug-in-like technology."

Java TV^TM API Security

"Security has to be built into the DNA of the platform," commented Rivas. "When the Java TV API and digital television really take off, I expect my Mom to be typing her VISA card number into the television. That is a level of trust my Mom does not now have in her browser."

The Java platform has been more publicly tested for security than any other. "When you first heard about Java technology, you would read stories about someone who broke the Java virtual machine. You don't read about that any more. To my knowledge, it just doesn't happen," said Rivas.

The Next Step

"We expect to have a reference implementation available to platform vendors in the first quarter of 2000," reports Rivas. "We also expect to have a content developers kit that actually brings all this together in the second quarter of 2000. We plan to run developer camps in the second quarter of 2000 to produce content folks doing the Java TV API. We are very excited about all of this."

Java^TM Technology Anywhere, Weather Anywhere

Karen Lennon matches Java technology and weather info

The day may be near when we wake up in the morning and read the day's weather forecast in our digital alarm clock, or embedded in the thermostat. Karen Lennon, VP of the Next Generations Platform Group at the Weather Channel, observed that Java technology and weather information are well matched. She offered a vision of the set-top box as the center of the home network environment. "The weather is of interest to everyone. With home appliances connected on a network through Java technology, we can sprinkle little bits of weather information around the home through a Java application in a set-top box. It can speak to other Java technology-enabled devices in the home."

The Weather Channel, established in 1982, is in 80% of cable households. Its team of 100 meteorologists provide timely high-quality weather information through its cable network and the Internet, as well as telephone, radio and newspaper reports. It is currently developing a weather-on-demand program through Java TV technology.

AT&T: A Strategy of Simplicity

With half of the population without access to the Internet, interactive TV, to appeal to a mass audience, will have to move slowly and keep interactions simple. David Rudnick, VP of the Interactive Offering Group at AT&T, spoke of both the vast potential and cautious approach necessary for interactive TV. AT&T is partnering with Sun and using Java TV technology in its DCT 5000 set-top boxes, set for deployment in 2000.

David Rudnick emphasizes simplicity in digital TV

"We are not providing the Internet on a monitor. We are providing a viewing experience through TV. This has to be drop dead simple," insisted Rudnick.

PC or TV? Colliding Cultures

At the cocktail party's animated Q&A following the speaker presentations, an Australian journalist pointed out that interactive TV exists at the intersection of two colliding cultures. TV watchers are used to buying a dependable product that lasts 7 to 10 years. On the other hand, computer users, at the desktop level, have learned to accept almost daily software failure and hardware that needs to be replaced every two years. The consumer-oriented TV industry, which values simplicity, is colliding with the computer industry that believes complexity is a desired feature worth spending money on.

David Rudnick said that AT&T has high standards of reliability with its set-top boxes, equal to that of phone lines. Kevin Hause of IDC argued that the complexity of interactive TV needs to be hidden from the consumer as much as possible. The 50 million American households without PCs, when asked why they don't own them, put complexity at the top of the list, according to Hause. Sharleen Smith of Oxygen Media maintained that, with interactive TV, less is more. She expects interactive TV viewers to start out learning slowly and then take off.

Stay Tuned: Pretty Picture Ahead

Ultimately, it appears that no one is certain how TV consumers will respond to the wealth of options that will be placed before them. But one thing is certain: however digital television plays out, Java TV technology will be at the center of the story.

See Also

Java TV^TM API Home Page
(http://webwork/products/javatv/index.html)

World 's First Set-Top Box Implementation of Java^TM Media Framework and Java^TM Smart Card
(http://www-us.semiconductors.philips.com/news/content/file_501.html)