Online Media News: Cambridge Consumers Move Into 21st Century with Interactive TV

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30th March 1995 Press Release

Cambridge Consumers Move Into 21st Century with Interactive TV


Peter Bonfield, Chairman and Chief Executive of ICL, the
leading information technology company, will today switch on
the new server for Phase 2 of the Cambridge interactive TV
Trial.

Phase 2 of the Trial will see more homes, along with schools
and businesses, connected with a wider range of interactive
services. These services available on demand already include
films and documentaries, news and weather, home shopping and
previews of forthcoming broadcast channels.

The trial will run through 1995, developing into a commercial
market trial later in the year. The trial, which will
initially be to 100 households in the Cambridge area, will be
extended to 250 later in the year as the number of services
grow. Delivering services to this number of households requires
a high performance interactive server. The ICL PimSERVER
(Parallel Interactive Media Server), with the vast storage
capacity needed to deliver video services, is an innovative
development from ICL's operation in Manchester.

A fully populated PimSERVER will support a population of up to
7000 connected homes, with around 2000 homes accessing the
service concurrently. These households can be watching a
variety of material, including any one of 1000 different
feature length films (equivalent to 1.4 Terabytes of disk
storage) stored on the server.

Peter Bonfield comments "The multimedia revolution and the
global information highway open up opportunities for totally
new businesses and consumer lifestyles. ICL is determined to be
at the forefront of this revolution, and this trial is a key
step in that process. The innovative technology which we bring
to this trial will be at the heart of the interactive TV
services which will dominate the future of the world's
entertainment industry."

Mike Raynor, Vice President, Marketing for ICL High Performance
Systems comments "We believe ICL is the only European supplier
of the parallel technology required to enable cost effective
delivery of interactive services. Clearly the potential market
for media servers of this kind could run into many thousands of
systems in the years ahead."

Malcolm Bird from Online Media comments "The iTV trial here in
Cambridge is taking on growing importance as it becomes a
catalyst for iTV service development and a living proof of wide
area ATM use. We are pleased to welcome ICL to the consortium
bringing mature scalable server technology allowing us to grow
the trial rapidly. The distributed intelligence of our Set-top
products along with the ATM network is proving to be a highly
effective solution"

Kim Spence-Jones, Managing Director SJ Research, "From the
outset the Cambridge Trial has focused on developing
commercially viable solutions. The inclusion of the ICL server
technology will help tremendously with achieving this
objective."

Hugo Davenport, Chairman of the Cambridge Cable Group of
companies comments "I welcome ICL's participation in this
trial, especially as it is one of the few suppliers currently
able to provide media servers of the enormous capacity which
will be required to support large numbers of concurrent users
for this type of application."

Pat O'Hearn, Managing Director Advanced Telecommunications
Modules Limited ('ATML'), said "Our collaboration in Phase 1 of
the trial has gone extremely well and has shown that ATM is the
obvious choice for delivering a wide range of on-demand
services to the home. We are pleased with the continuing
expansion of the trial in both scale and content as this
clearly demonstrates that ATML's low cost, scalable products
are ideally suited to the commercial demands of interactive
television."

Background

The Cambridge digital interactive TV trial, launched in
September 1994, involves installing a set-top box, which looks
like a smaller version of a video recorder, to the cable feed
to the television set in people's homes.

Users then have access to a variety of interactive services
from a control centre in Cambridge. The 'on-demand' services
available include movies, education, games, news from ITN,
documentaries and weather from Anglia TV. Subscribers can
access and control these as and when they wish using a remote
control.

ICL's PimSERVER (Parallel Interactive Media Server), is a
derivative of the massively parallel processing technology used
within ICL's high performance relational database server, the
GOLDRUSH MegaSERVER. The system, which has been delivered with
200 Gigabytes of disk storage, will allow the number of user
channels to be increased as the active user base grows.



Cambridge Trial Consortium - Background Information

The Trial members are :

ICL

ICL is a leading information technology company specialising in
systems integration in selected markets. Operating in over 80
countries with 23,000 employees, it generated revenues of #2.6
billion in 1994. Through its service and product businesses,
ICL also provides its customers with long term support and
access to the widest range of technology.

SJ Research

SJ Research specialises in low-cost ATM switching, especially
in so-called 'Hybrid Fibre-Coax' networks. In such networks
the data is distributed to the kerb-side cabinets ('little
green boxes') through optical fibres and delivered to the home
on low-cost coax cable. The company was formed fifteen years
ago and has been involved in computer networking since its
early days. It has been working on ATM networking for the past
four years and to date has sold more than 3000 ATM switches.

ATML

Advanced Telecommunications Modules Limited ('ATML') designs,
develops and markets a range of low cost, high speed
asynchronous transfer mode ('ATM') products for PC workgroups
and video-on-demand applications. A complete client/server and
multimedia internetworking solution is provided by a family of
25 Mbps switches, plug and play PC network interface cards and
multi-stream media-server. The Company's technology leadership
is founded on developments by engineers at Cambridge University
and at the Olivetti Research Laboratory. ATML has offices in
Cambridge England and Sunnyvale California.


Cambridge Cable

Cambridge Cable Limited is part of the Cambridge Cable group of
companies, comprising Cambridge Cable, Anglia Cable, East Coast
Cable and Southern East Anglia. Backed by Comcast and
Singapore Telecom, the companies are currently building an
advanced communications network which will provide cable
television and telephony services to homes and businesses
within the four East Anglia franchise areas. The Cambridge
Cable Group was formed in 1988 and has grown to be one of the
region's largest employers. The group's first cable television
subscriber was connected in June 1991 and the first
telecommunications services provided in late 1992.

Online Media

Online Media is a member of the Acorn Computer Group and has
the full strategic backing from Acorn's parent company,
Olivetti. Established in July 1994, Online Media provides
innovative, affordable, interactive television products in
hardware, enabling software and services to meet the
requirements of the markets emerging from the information
superhighway. The company focuses on cost competitive designs,
which exploit emerging standards, and its first product, an
intelligent digital set-top box, is already in production and
in use. Alongside hardware products, Online Media offers
authoring systems, services and consultancy in service
development, as well as other areas. All Online Media designs
are available under licence.

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