September 26, 1996
As the U.S. electronics industry debates the grand divide between PC and TV, Japan's consumer giants are playing it both ways. Brandishing a host of new products-digital cameras, PDAs, digital satellite decoders, Internet TVs and a new box called the "Intertext TV"-Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba and Hitachi will march into the Japan Electronics Show this week with solutions for both PC and TV environments.
The assumption is that whichever platform wins, Japan gets a head start in the market by investing in both. DVD is viewed here as a unifying peripheral that bridges both TV and computer.
"What may control the future of a living room could be both PCs and something like a PC-though it's not a PC," said Minoru Morio, executive deputy president and chief technology officer at Sony Corp. "I believe that TV will be reborn as a new display device-somewhere between a computer monitor and a TV screen- ultimately even with bit-map capabilities," said Toshiyoshi Endo, a general manager in Hitachi Ltd.'s Multimedia Systems R&D division.
Japanese companies can afford a scattershot approach, thanks to their size. Most consumer-electronics manufacturers are marshaling two competing lines of R&D simultaneously, preparing to shift all of their energies to the winning side when the dust finally settles, probably over the next two to three years.
"The rapid progress the PC is making in handling audiovisual data has given us an enormous sense of crisis," said Akitaka Nishimura, manager at the PC-centric Consumer Division at Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
Matsushita's product-development program, code-named AccessVision, encompasses both "true home PC" and "next-generation TV" based on the Windows platform, Nishimura said. Now solely eyeing the Japanese domestic market, the company has launched a 2-foot AccessVision home PC that is operated by touch panel.
Next up is a 10-foot model composed of a PC box-either tower or set-top-that sits next to or atop a wide-screen TV. Consumers will run it by remote control. "We hope to launch the product before the end of March 1997," said Nishimura.
Sony has begun testing the waters in the United States with its first home PC, while Toshiba Corp. also entered the U.S. desktop market this month with its Infinia home PC. The Toshiba machine features one-touch access for checking phone messages, making calls, playing a CD or tuning into TV or radio.
After that comes DVD. Atsutoshi Nishida, general manager of Toshiba's PC division, said the next step will be a small, slick DVD-based box featuring PC functions and applications, Internet access and a keyboard-but no monitor. The product, easily controlled by a remote, is designed for connection to a large - screen TV, he explained.
Even as they field freshly designed computers with a heavy emphasis on consumer-electronics technologies, most vendors are expending even greater resources on non-PC digital interactive products. The hottest of all, lined up for live demos at the show this week, are consumer devices with Internet access.
Indeed, whether handled via PC or TV, the Internet connection is quickly becoming a must-have. Companies such as Sharp and Mitsubishi are offering Internet TVs, wide-screen sets incorporating a Web browser and high-speed modem. Hitachi is taking a separate route with a box it calls an "Internet player."
The standalone product, to be unveiled here, incorporates a 28.8-kbit/s modem, a proprietary Web browser and a 4X-speed CD-ROM drive. It's "designed to seamlessly combine stored information on video CDs and fresh data downloaded from the Internet," said Hitachi's Endo, who manages the Multimedia R&D division's business development center for new technology and products.
Endo believes that the first-generation Internet TVs as designed today won't cut much ice with consumers. "The connection to the Internet is still painfully slow and operations are too cumbersome," he said. That's why Hitachi opted for offering Internet access combined with a disk.
Endo said the company is negotiating with competitors who espouse the VideoCD format-including Sony, Matsushita, Philips and Victor Co. of Japan (JVC) - to standardize protocols and a data structure on a VideoCD disk and player so that stored information accessed from the Net can be viewed on any Internet player.
Alongside the Internet, additional digital pipes-satellites, cables, telephone lines, digital cameras and DVDs-are getting hooked up to the TV. As a result, major efforts are under way to equip TVs for multiscanning different frequency-based sources. "Consumers will start demanding a TV that can display not only the best visual images from VCRs or DVDs, but also allow them to read text much more clearly," said Endo.
JVC, for example, has launched a set capable of receiving 31.5-kHz extended-definition TV, 33.75-kHz Hi-Vision (Japanese HDTV), 31.5-kHz VGA-quality PC graphics and 35-kHz Apple Macintosh graphics. The box manages all this by using a wide-screen, Hi-Vision-quality display with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio and a finer dot pitch.
The wide aspect ratio means the TV can show images from multiple channels and multiple sources, allowing consumers to receive various data services-whether the Internet or teletext-on one side while watching moving video on the other, said Muneyasu Kusuyae, general manager of the product-planning group at JVC's Television sector. Also, a split screen can display VGA-graphics data and NTSC video at the same time.
The next leap forward in text on TV will be off and running next month, when Intertext TV becomes Japan's first interactive-TV service. Toshiba and several other set makers are expected to demonstrate Intertext TVs, which use vertical blanking intervals and upstream data capability over a phone line, at the Electronics Show. Toshiba has developed an ASIC to decode Intertext software.