Making interactive television software work in set-top boxes with less memory has been a challenge for software developers.

Companies that write applications and those that develop middleware ? mediation programs that ensure that set-top boxes can run those applications ? earlier this year discovered that cable operators were putting off plans to deploy sophisticated set-top boxes.

Instead of boxes with heaps of processing power and memory (known as thick clients), such as Motorola's DCT-5000 series and the Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 5000, operators were opting for less expensive, thin-client models, like the DCT-2000 and S-A's 2000.

Software companies had developed services and applications that depended on those sophisticated boxes. While some of those services and applications can be revised for thin clients, some simply will not run with less than the expected processing power and memory, so not having advanced boxes deployed is a clear reversal. The same is true for some middleware.

?Regarding the switch from a high-end box to a low-end box, that will be a pain for those who placed their bets on the high end. Those with less financing will wilt, while those with resources may be able to hang on,? said Ramon Chen, VP-worldwide marketing for MetaTV, an interactive software company.

Other developers had the experience or the resources or both to cover all platform bases ? thin clients, thick clients and all the various incarnations of each.

The shift away from thick clients has definitely had consequences for middleware companies such as Microsoft TV and Liberate, which were expecting the deployment of thick clients, said Adi Kishore, analyst at the Yankee Group. Nonetheless, Liberate has proved itself nimble enough to shift its focus to thin clients, and Microsoft has the financial and technological resources to do likewise.

Any ITV service or application (or content) company that was working exclusively on thick-client products is in bad shape. ?If that was the game they were playing, that game is over,? Kishore said. The issue now is whether they will be able to leverage their expertise and core competencies to bring products or services to less powerful platforms.

Respond TV and Digeo are among the software companies that had most of their eggs in the thick-client basket.

Some companies, like Microsoft TV and MetaTV, took the approach that different systems with a range of capabilities would be extant for some time to come. For these companies, the delay in the rollout of advanced set-tops will at worst force them to re-allocate some resources.

As it has seen in the computer business, Microsoft expects to see different set-top platforms with different capabilities when dealing with cable technology, and it has always seen the need to be able to scale an application from a small, resource-limited device to more powerful systems. In the long run, Microsoft believes that thick clients will be able to offer more value and will eventually win out.

?The challenge for everyone is how to enable network operators to make the migration,? said Paul Mitchell, senior director of the Microsoft TV platform. ?Our position is: start with lightweight HTML that works in a low-level box and can be scaled up to a high-end box.?

Last week Charter Communications said it would use Microsoft TV as its software platform for ITV services. The company plans to deploy 1 million advanced Motorola DCT-5000 boxes over the next seven years.

MetaTV's heritage is also in the computer business, where struggles to get single applications to run across multiple platforms are commonplace. ?We got into this because we knew that was going to happen in ITV too,? said Chen.

The company's approach allows applications to be written using high-level descriptions that can be stored at the head-end. MetaTV then provides tools that generate code appropriate to the amount of memory and processing power in the end user's set-top box. If an operator deploys three different set-top boxes, three different sets of code are generated to allow the application to run.

?Now the lower-end box has been discovered to be quite capable,? Chen said. ?The 2000-level boxes are out there, and more people will have access to ITV.?

One thing Liberate did when facing the thin-client problem was to switch to a Java-based platform from its own, bulkier software. The company's first implementation of Java was for its TV Navigator.

Some companies, however, focused on 2000-level boxes, with the expectation that ITV applications could be beefed up whenever the rollout of 5000-level boxes should commence. OpenTV, for example, falls into that category.

Michael Collette, SVP-marketing and business development at OpenTV, naturally saw the shift toward the 2000-level set-tops as good. The company has its own tools and middleware.

?The basis of our competitiveness is delivering performance with limited power and memory,? he said. ?Our tools are admittedly a little harder to use, but the payoff is that you get tighter code? ? applications that are small enough that they can more easily reside in the limited-memory resources of thin clients. ?And the applications that run today will continue to run.?

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