FREMONT, Calif. — Digital receiver maker SkyTune is set to announce a pair of deals targeting the slowly developing datacasting market as well as ongoing problems with digital TV reception.
SkyTune, based here, and digital TV pioneer Sarnoff Corp. (Princeton, N.J.) will jointly develop receivers that allow PC and Internet appliance vendors to incorporate digital TV and datacasting capabilities into their products. The agreement allows SkyTune to use Sarnoff's single-chip approach to improving DTV reception to develop PC receivers and datacasting applications.
Sarnoff has been incorporating dynamic ghost-canceling technology into its designs for improving indoor reception of digital TV signals using vestigial sideband (8-VSB) demodulation. "What we're going to be doing is really beefing that improved reception capability up," said Mike Noonen, SkyTune's vice president of sales and marketing.
The licensing deal also gives Sarnoff a minority stake in SkyTune, formerly known as chip maker Auravision, Noonen said.
The partners said their goal is to speed PC reception of digital and analog broadcasts through a single chip that integrates improved 8-VSB demodulation, an NTSC decoder and filters. The system would work with computers using PCI- and 1394-based buses. Samples of the single-chip solution are expected to be ready in time for the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in April, Noonen said.
The estimated 25 million PCs that currently include PCI and 1394 interfaces "could be fair game for our solution," he said, adding that the partners want to make it easy for PC and receiver makers to integrate the solution.
A related deal also to be announced Monday (Nov. 1) calls for SkyTune, National Semiconductor Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and software developer NewCurve Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.) to jointly develop a reference design for a datacasting receiver based on the U.S. digital-TV specification. Their goal is to create a mass market for datacasting through a low-cost Internet appliance that receives and caches Internet content that is broadcast via digital TV signals.
The goal of creating a consumer market for digital datacasting of such things as sports scores and stock-market tickers remains elusive, industry observers said. "This whole area of datacasting is still a little bit away, partly because of the reception technology but more importantly because broadcasters really haven't nailed down how or what they're going to do in that business," said industry analyst Gary Arlen of Arlen Communications Inc. (Bethesda, Md.). "As long as there are no datacasting signals going through the DTV bandwidth, there's not a whole lot of use for reception tuner equipment."
Still, SkyTune and its partners hope that products based on their reference design will pave the way for offering customized broadband services at a cost of less than $300 each, the target for most mass-market consumer electronics products.
The reference design, an application of Sarnoff's DTV reception technology, will incorporate National's Geode chip along with SkyTune's ATSC 8-VSB receiver and NewCurve's embedded media caching applications.
Noonen said the reference design should be ready in time for the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Sarnoff and SkyTune expect to begin sampling the datacasting receiver by mid-2000. The partners also said their approach to datacasting addresses the current debate over how to improve indoor reception of digital TV.
