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Jim Barthold
Dave Brown has an analogy he likes to use about computer power.
"I bought a computer in 1991 for business school. It was a state-of-the-art 486 33 MHz," he recalls. "My perspective was that 10 years before that I was getting out of engineering school and the whole damned school was running on a machine that was not that good.
"The point is, as the resources get better, people use them."
It's a point Brown is making in his new job as VP-business development and GM of U.S. Operations for Israel-based Peach Networks Inc.
Peach, said Brown, "is an enabler. What we enable is any PC applications to run over digital cable."
So do a few other companies, with names like WebTV, WorldGate Communications Inc. and ICTV jumping to mind. Peach is trying to carve out its market niche by using a Windows base and working through a very thin client running on set-top boxes.
"Windows tools are so ubiquitous and so easy and so cheap it's not hard to find somebody who can program the visual basics," he said. "You can write some pretty snazzy apps with inexpensive and readily available tools."
That's one Peach selling point. The other is the market Brown is hoping to create.
"We're going to create a software rental market that doesn't exist now," he predicted. "Companies that have software that they want to try to sell now have a distribution channel, a way where people can buy it on a per-use basis."
An example of that, he said, are video games.
"Instead of spending 30 bucks to buy it, I could rent it and the technology will let MSOs bill whatever they want. They can bill for use, per hour, per day."
It's a ready-made incremental stream, he said.
Peach has developed an advanced architecture to complete this vision, said Brown, whose previous work has included two stints with General Instrument Corp. in both engineering and marketing, as well as working on video encryption technology and array processing. He also spent some time in an ill-fated attempt to develop off-premises control product.
"We (Peach) use a dual Pentium MMX architecture. By using multi-user, each singleboard user in our server supports at least 15 users, if they're doing something fairly intensive like surfing the Internet," he said, pointing out that this is the high-end reach for the service.
"Our benchmark number is 200 kilobits per second," which, while it may not seem much when talking about live video, is a huge chunk of power when it comes to graphics, he continued.
Peach, like everyone reaching for a piece of the cable pipe, has its limitations. One of them, however, is not the amount of bandwidth it consumes on the return path.
"The return path demands are really kind of small," he said. "All you're doing, even with a game, is sending a command to move the mouse or a click."
On the other hand, contention is an issue.
"It takes time to get from the headend to the user and back," he admitted. "When you're in an arcade and doing one of these virtual reality games, the latency has to be close to zero. That's physically impossible on the cable plant."
That's, however, a conventional use of the network and, Brown said, Peach is looking at things unconventionally.
"I think the thing to stress about Peach is there are probably things it opens up that I can't even think of," he noted.
What he can think of, he said, is that as capabilities increase, providers like Peach will be there to take advantage.
"People are interested," he pointed out. "The product is not quite ready (but) I'm just about to be at a point where I can say 'Are you ready to do this?'"
When that day arrives, he said, he is confident that U.S. cable operators will be ready to try their luck at programming the Internet for the television.
"They can generate their own applications or create an easy environment (for others) to develop applications," he continued. "If you want to write a program guide for your local operation, it's pretty simple; if you want to put Yellow Pages or text or news or graphics or whatever."
Because, as Brown well knows, demands change to fit the capabilities Peach locates at the headend.
"All the processing power and all of the intelligence is in the headend and the server. We take the graphics commands ... intercept those, compress them into MPEG-2 transport and send it down to the cable plant. We do full MPEG-2, not just still frames. We do audio."
And, he concluded, they do Windows.
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