The Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF), a cross-industry group that leverages Internet standards, plans to announce new partners and products backing its version of merged data and digital TV services at CES. In a separate project, called Flora, a group of broadcasters, content providers and systems makers is quietly preparing its own demonstration of Web services based on standards laid out by the Advanced Television Systems Committee's DTV Application Software Environment (DASE) group.

Both ATVEF and DASE proponents claim to be building a migration path that will bridge the two specs. But the camps remain worlds apart on a major sticking point: whether to embrace the Java language.

ATVEF proponents, including Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., hope to capture an early lead in the emerging TV-plus-data market by promoting a specification that eschews the full Java programming environment for an approach based on the JavaScript utility and HTML 4.0. For its part, the DASE group is nearing completion of a spec based on Java and Extensible Markup Language (XML).

Both groups expect to hit the market next year. The Public Broadcasting Service and NBC will turn on ATVEF-style services; DTV chip maker TeraLogic will show ATVEF-ready silicon at CES; and PCI-based decoder cards geared for the ATVEF proposal will hit the retail market. DASE-compliant products may not come to the retail market until the second half of 2000; the group plans to launch trials in March.

The DASE spec employs the DASE Java APIs and an underlying Java platform in a receiver system. The idea behind the DASE Java APIs is to create an operating system-independent, level playing field both for broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers. Its goal is to afford all DASE-based systems full access to all programs and services built on the DASE Java platform.

Several major consumer electronics companies and set-top vendors, including Philips and Sony, are committed to developing DTV receiver/set-top systems based on a full-blown Java programming environment.

The relatively slower rollout of the DASE approach may reflect the desire among supporters of the Java TV APIs, particularly Sun Microsystems, to demonstrate that their APIs function as a common interface by making sure "all the executables are supported exactly the same way by add-in cards, receivers and set-tops designed by all parties," said Eric Chu, group manager of vertical product marketing for consumer and embedded products at Sun Microsystems.

For system vendors that may have to choose between ATVEF- and DASE-compliant designs for their products next year, Chu cautioned, "extensibility is the key. If you start with ATVEF, it's hard to add Java to your design later on." With a full-blown Java approach, "it's always easy to include ATVEF-like capabilities or a JavaScript browser in your platform."

Moreover, he said, use of the the full Java platform opens the door to interactive entertainment applications.

Digital TV receivers will face similar requirements whether they are designed to decode ATVEF-compliant content or DASE Java content. Compared with standard digital TV decoding, however, data-plus-TV applications will demand higher processing power, more memory and a graphics engine tightly integrated with new software.

An MPEG decoder is insufficient for data services. "You need a processor to interpret or execute the code that is authored in a declarative such as HTML or procedural such as JavaScript or Java language," said DASE chairman Aninda Das Gupta.

The key is "hardware capability that's tightly integrated with the software stack," said Kishore Manghnani, vice president of marketing at TeraLogic Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). "Your silicon needs not only to capture the data but also to present the data in a way exactly specified by broadcasters."

For example, if statistics were sent as a data stream together with a sports broadcast, the chip would be expected to know the presentation requirements for the data application. That would allow it to display data in a certain place on a screen, in a size, resolution and color depth defined by broadcasters. TeraLogic is working with unidentified partners to develop software drivers to make its own hardware ATVEF-compliant.

As for memory requirements, DASE-compliant systems today require more ROM than those based on ATVEF. It currently takes 4 Mbytes of ROM to process the DASE Java API, Das Gupta said, compared with 1.5 to 2 Mbytes of ROM for ATVEF content processing. Nonetheless, he explained that the current DASE implementation is based on prototype code and has not been optimized to the same extent as typical HTML 4.0 browsers.

In terms of RAM, both ATVEF and DASE will have similar requirements, said Das Gupta. Most of the RAM is used by the application, and most of the application's RAM requirement is in the form of storing "assets" such as GIF and JPEG files, other graphics and sound clips.

In fact, what separates ATVEF from DASE is more software than hardware. Under the ATVEF approach, the data stream, once extracted from the transport stream, is processed as an Internet Protocol stack and placed in a custom-built ATVEF browser cache. Engineers at Intel Corp.'s Intel Architecture Labs are writing code for custom browsers, also known as viewers. Two unidentified vendors of add-in cards will produce their own customized viewers.

At least one other chip maker besides TeraLogic is said to be working on ATVEF-compliant receiver chips. Intel does not plan to make such silicon, but it has taken an active role in the group, helping to develop low-level code and enable the broader business.

"We have introduced board makers who are partnering with OEMs for products that should hit the retail channel in April or June," said Dean Tucker, marketing manager for enhanced broadcasting at Intel.

While Intel is a key player in ATVEF, Tucker rejected the notion that the group is PC-centric in its approach. "There will be plenty of ATVEF products that will not be PC-centric. They will be consumer-electronics products," he said.

Gerry Kaufhold, an analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group (Scottsdale, Ariz.), said he thinks "the biggest problem with ATVEF is that they still need to convince big-name CE partners to develop ATVEF-compliant set-top boxes."

Meanwhile, DASE backers have developed their own prototype Net TVs. Philips has a DASE prototype based on its 64-inch ATSC HD receiver, which is currently on the market, according to Das Gupta.

Philips also has a prototype that uses a TriMedia processor for A/V and a MIPS RISC processor for the DASE data. As for the processing power, "we have found low-end — say 50 Mips — processors enough for decoding DASE-like content," Das Gupta said.

It is unclear which add-in card vendors will be the first to commit to the ATVEF-compliant products. Ken Plotkin, vice president of marketing at Hauppauge Computer Works Inc., said adding ATVEF support to the company's PC/HDTV receiver card "is not high up on our priority list right now. We are more focused on technologies, such as digital VCR and time-shifting capabilities, for our add-in cards."