Nearly 90 Firms Attend OCAP™ Developers’ Conference Interoperability Testing Event |
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CableLabs® reported recently that representatives from nearly 90 different companies participated in the recent OpenCable™ Developers’ Conference and the first OCAP™ interoperability testing event. More than 165 attendees represented a range of companies from start-ups to large international corporations, many of which sent multiple members to the conference to represent their various business units. This conference was one of a series of developers’ conferences that illustrate the on-going cable industry commitment to making OpenCable and a retail environment for digital set tops and other devices a reality. OCAP stands for OpenCable Application Platform and is intended to extend the goals of the OpenCable project into a software environment for the next generation of interactive television applications. “We discovered that there is a ready-made MHP community of reference implementation vendors, interactive application developers, and infrastructure tool vendors that can quickly apply their expertise to the OCAP environment,” said Don Dulchinos, Vice President of Advanced Platforms and Services at CableLabs. “I believe this larger-than-expected turnout is partly the result of our active alliance with the European DVB organization,” he added. Georg Luetteke, Chairman of the MHP Group of the DVB Commercial Module, said: “I am impressed by the large participation and the quality of presentations and discussions at the various events during the conference. OCAP/MHP is an important step towards a global solution for interactive multimedia applications and forms another milestone for converging the worlds of Digital Television and the Internet.” The conference and interoperability event were coordinated and sponsored by CableLabs in conjunction with 20 vendors actively developing products or services that support the OpenCable platform. CableLabs summarized its project and the OCAP specifications, described its OCAP compliance test process, and discussed the OpenCable Applications Platform specification roadmap. Companies that participated in the conference are listed below. Thirteen participating companies presented on topics covering reference OCAP/MHP implementations, application developer toolkits, content authoring tools, application servers and data carousels for interactive television (iTV), software test and diagnostic tools, application management and delivery mechanisms, emerging Java technologies for iTV, and developer support programs. Following the developer conference, CableLabs opened its facilities to 14 active implementers who successfully demonstrated the interoperability of several different iTV applications simultaneously running on various manufacturers’ hardware platforms. The success of this interoperability demonstrates the feasibility and near-term reality of running various iTV applications on a number of different platforms, without undergoing the costly and time-consuming process of “porting” each application to each manufacturer’s hardware and operating system. This “application portability” is made possible by the software interface described in the OCAP specification, and is an important competitive response in the delivery of cable services. Application portability also is considered by many to be a critical objective of competitive retail suppliers of set-top boxes and television receivers so that those retail devices may deliver the same digital cable services to customers as the services being delivered to customers with leased digital cable set-top boxes. “Our interoperability testing is an extremely valuable part of the whole process,” said CableLabs President and CEO Dr. Richard R. Green. “We have used this process successfully in the past with our DOCSIS™ cable modem program, and it has proven to accelerate the development work of the different vendors,” Green added. OpenCable is an initiative sponsored by leading cable television companies, managed through CableLabs, with a goal of attaining interoperable digital set-top boxes and other advanced digital devices manufactured by multiple vendors. These devices would be capable of delivering digital video, data and interactive services to a television set. The capability also may be built into consumer electronics devices, such as digital television receivers. List of Participating Companies—OCAP Developers' ConferenceFebruary 14, 2002
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