Apple Interactive Television Box

Last updated

Apple interactive television box.jpg
Prototype
Developer Apple Inc.
Product family Macintosh Quadra 605 or LC 475
Type Set top box prototype
LifespanEarly 1990s
Discontinued1995 (1995)
Operating system System 7.1
Storage ROM
Input Remote control
Platform Macintosh
Marketing target Consumer, enterprise, and hospitality
Predecessor Macintosh TV
Successor Pippin
Apple TV

The Apple Interactive Television Box (AITB) is a television set-top box developed by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) in partnership with a number of global telecommunications firms, including British Telecom and Belgacom. Prototypes of the unit were deployed at large test markets in parts of the United States and Europe in 1994 and 1995, but the product was canceled shortly thereafter, and was never mass-produced or marketed. [1]

Contents

Overview

Rear of the unit Apple set top box back.jpg
Rear of the unit

The AITB was designed as an interface between a consumer and an interactive television service. [2] The unit's remote control would allow a user to choose what content would be shown on a connected television, and to seek with fast forward and rewind. In this regard it is similar to a modern satellite receiver or TiVo unit. The box would only pass along the user's choices to a central content server for streaming instead of issuing content itself. There were also plans for game shows, educational material for children, and other forms of content made possible by the interactive qualities of the device.

Early conceptual prototypes have an unfinished feel. Near-completion units have a high production quality, the internal components often lack prototype indicators, and some units have FCC approval stickers. These facts, along with a full online manual [3] suggest the product was very near completion before being canceled.

Infrastructure

Because the machine was designed to be part of a subscription data service, the AITB units are mostly inoperable. The ROM contains only what is required to continue booting from an external hard drive or from its network connection. Many of the prototypes do not appear to even attempt to boot. This is likely dependent on changes in the ROM. The ROM itself contains parts of a downsized System 7.1, enabling it to establish a network connection to the media servers provided by Oracle. The Oracle Media Server (OMS) initially ran on hardware produced by Larry Ellison's nCube Systems company, but was later also made available by Oracle on SGI, Alpha, Sun, SCO, Netware, Windows NT, and AIX systems. These servers also provided the parts of the OS not implemented in ROM of the AITB via the OMS Boot Service. Therefore, an AITB must establish a network connection successfully in order to finish the boot process. Using a command key combination and a PowerBook SCSI adapter, it is possible to get the AITB to boot into a preinstalled System 7.1 through an external SCSI hard drive.

In July 2016, images were published on a video game forum that appear to show a Super Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge designed to work with the British Telecom variant of the AITB. [4] The cartridge is labeled "BT GameCart" and includes an 8-pin serial connector designed to connect to the Apple System/Peripheral 8 port on the rear of the box. A BT promotional film for the service trial discusses a way users could download and play Nintendo video games via the system. [5] [6] [ dubious ]

Specifications

The Apple Interactive Television Box is based upon the Macintosh Quadra 605 or LC 475. Because the box was never marketed, not all specifications have been stated by Apple. It supports MPEG-2 Transport containing ISO11172 (MPEG-1) bit streams, Apple Desktop Bus, RF in and out, S-Video out, RCA audiovideo out, RJ-45 connector for either E1 data stream on PAL devices or T1 data stream on NTSC devices, serial port, and HDI-30 SCSI. [3] Apple intended to offer the AITB with a matching black ADB mouse, keyboard, Apple 300e CD-ROM drive, StyleWriter printer, and one of several styles of remote controls.

The hard drive contains parts of a regular North American System 7.1.1 with Finder, several sockets for network connection protocols, and customized MPEG1 decoding components for the QuickTime Player software.

History

A few units contain a special boot ROM which allows the device to boot locally from a SCSI hard drive that has the OS and applications contained within the box; these devices were used primarily by developers inside Apple and Oracle, and for limited demonstration purposes. In normal network use, content and program code was served to the box by Oracle OMS over the network to implement the box's interactivity.

A few hundred to a few thousand units were deployed at Disneyland California hotels and provided in room shopping and park navigation. Approximately 2,500 units were installed and used in consumer homes in England during the second interactive television trial conducted by British Telecom and Oracle, which was in Ipswich, UK. The set-top applications were developed using Oracle's Oracle Media Objects (OMO) product, which is somewhat similar to HyperCard, but was enhanced significantly to operate in a network-based interactive TV environment.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Motherboard</span> Main printed circuit board (PCB) used for a computing device

A motherboard is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals. Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems, such as the central processor, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SCSI</span> Set of computer and peripheral connection standards

Small Computer System Interface is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced in the 1980s and has seen widespread use on servers and high-end workstations, with new SCSI standards being published as recently as SAS-4 in 2017.

Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. iSCSI facilitates data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. It can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval.

Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos, television shows and films without a traditional video playback device and a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of over-the-air programming was the most common form of media distribution. As Internet and IPTV technologies continued to develop in the 1990s, consumers began to gravitate towards non-traditional modes of content consumption, which culminated in the arrival of VOD and over-the-top (OTT) media services on televisions and personal computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MSN TV</span> Thin client that used a television for display

MSN TV was a web access product consisting of a thin client device that used a television for display, and the online service that supported it. The original WebTV device design and service were developed by WebTV Networks, Inc., a company started in 1995. The WebTV product was announced in July 1996 and later released on September 18, 1996. In April 1997, the company was purchased by Microsoft Corporation and in July 2001, was rebranded to MSN TV and absorbed into MSN.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Power Macintosh G3</span> Series of personal computers by Apple

The Power Macintosh G3 is a series of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from November 1997 to August 1999. It represented Apple's first step towards eliminating redundancy and complexity in the product line by replacing eight Power Macintosh models with three: Desktop and Mini Tower models for professional and home use, and an all-in-one model for education. The introduction of the Desktop and Mini Tower models coincided with Apple starting to sell build-to-order Macs directly from its web site in an online store, which was unusual for the time as Dell was the only major computer manufacturer doing this. Apple's move to build-to-order sales of the Power Macintosh G3 also coincided with the acquisition of Power Computing Corporation, which had been providing telephone sales of Macintosh clones for more than two years.

A digital video recorder (DVR), also referred to as a personal video recorder (PVR) particularly in Canada and British English, is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes (STB) with direct to disk recording, portable media players and TV gateways with recording capability, and digital camcorders. Personal computers are often connected to video capture devices and used as DVRs; in such cases the application software used to record video is an integral part of the DVR. Many DVRs are classified as consumer electronic devices. Similar small devices with built-in displays and SSD support may be used for professional film or video production, as these recorders often do not have the limitations that built-in recorders in cameras have, offering wider codec support, the removal of recording time limitations and higher bitrates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Home theater PC</span> PC meant to be used in a home theater setting

A home theater PC (HTPC) or media center computer is a convergent device that combines some or all the capabilities of a personal computer with a software application that focuses on video, photo, audio playback, and sometimes video recording functionality. Since the mid-2000s, other types of consumer electronics, including game consoles and dedicated media devices, have crossed over to manage video and music content. The term "media center" also refers to specialized application software designed to run on standard personal computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Protocol television</span> Television transmitted over a computer network

Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable transmission formats. Unlike downloaded media, IPTV offers the ability to stream the source media continuously and hence can begin playing the content almost immediately.

Datacasting is the transmission of data over a wide area using radio waves. It typically refers to supplemental information sent by television stations alongside digital terrestrial television (DTT) signals. However, datacasting can also be applied to digital data signals carried on analog TV or radio broadcasts.

An Option ROM for the PC platform is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card, which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS. In its usual use, it is essentially a driver that interfaces between the BIOS API and hardware. Technically, an option ROM is firmware that is executed by the BIOS after POST and before the BIOS boot process, gaining complete control of the system and being generally unrestricted in what it can do. The BIOS relies on each option ROM to return control to the BIOS so that it can either call the next option ROM or commence the boot process. For this reason, it is possible for an option ROM to keep control and preempt the BIOS boot process. The BIOS generally scans for and initializes option ROMs in ascending address order at 2 KB address intervals within two different address ranges above address C0000h in the conventional (20-bit) memory address space; later systems may also scan additional address ranges in the 24-bit or 32-bit extended address space.

The Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards, or Technology and Engineering Emmys, are one of two sets of Emmy Awards that are presented for outstanding achievement in engineering development in the television industry. The Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards are presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), while the separate Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards are given by its sister organization the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS).

The Apple Network Server (ANS) was a line of PowerPC-based server computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from February 1996 to April 1997. It was codenamed "Shiner" and originally consisted of two models, the Network Server 500/132 and the Network Server 700/150, which got a companion model, the Network Server 700/200 with a faster CPU in November 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital media player</span> Device used for playing media such as online video

A digital media player is a type of consumer electronics device designed for the storage, playback, or viewing of digital media content. They are typically designed to be integrated into a home cinema configuration, and attached to a television or AV receiver or both.

Monsoon Multimedia was a company that manufactured, developed and sold video streaming and place-shifting devices that allowed consumers to view and control live television on PCs connected to a local (home) network or remotely from a broadband-connected PC or mobile phone. It was one of 5 major transformations initiated by Prabhat Jain, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with 5 undergraduate and post graduate engineering degrees from Cal Berkeley and Univ of Vienna, Austria. On the even of Cisco acquiring Monsoon in 2017, EchoStar, the new parent of Sling sued Monsoon for patent infringement, having obtained confidential information about the date of the acquisition by Cisco from a Monsoon employee under murky circumstances. Monsoon settled the lawsuit by agreeing not to sell its products in the USA simply because it did not have the legal funds to fight mighty Echostar's legal maneuvers. EchoStar thus successfully removed its only competitor from the market place. This meant Monsoon's death knell.

The Telly home entertainment server is range of computer systems designed to store, manage, and access all forms of digital media in the home. Based on Interact-TV's Linux Media Center software, it provides user managed libraries for music, photos, and all forms of video from recorded television programming to DVDs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apple Pippin</span> 1996 video game console platform

The Pippin is a defunct open multimedia technology platform, designed by Apple Computer. According to Apple, Pippin was directed at the home market as "an integral part of the consumer audiovisual, stereo, and television environment".

A Web-to-TV installation provides a way to show streaming television or other over-the-top content from the Internet, to a television set. Various technologies to do this include Home theater PCs, digital media receivers, and Smart TVs.

Adaptive bitrate streaming is a technique used in streaming multimedia over computer networks.

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small segments, which are served over HTTP. An early HTTP web server based streaming system called SProxy was developed and deployed in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 2006. It showed how to use HTTP range requests to break the content into small segments. SProxy shows the effectiveness of segment based streaming, gaining best Internet penetration due to the wide deployment of firewalls, and reducing the unnecessary traffic transmission if a user chooses to terminate the streaming session earlier before reaching the end. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sport event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of playback time. While the content is being played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client uses a bit rate adaptation (ABR) algorithm to automatically select the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for playback without causing stalls or re-buffering events in the playback. The current MPEG-DASH reference client dash.js offers both buffer-based (BOLA) and hybrid (DYNAMIC) bit rate adaptation algorithms. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions and provide high quality playback with few stalls or re-buffering events.

References

  1. "Apple Interactive Television Box". Shrine Of Apple. September 15, 2011. Archived from the original on March 27, 2019. Retrieved October 11, 2012.
  2. Frommer, Dan (September 9, 2015). "A visual history of Apple's TV products". Quartz. Retrieved July 14, 2023.
  3. 1 2 "Apple Interactive Television Box: Setting up and using the equipment" (PDF). Apple Computer, Inc. 1995. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 5, 2013. Retrieved March 26, 2019.
  4. "Any idea what this is?". Archived from the original on March 29, 2019. Retrieved July 26, 2016.
  5. BT Interactive TV, archived from the original on August 18, 2016, retrieved July 26, 2016
  6. "BT Joins Forces with Nintendo". Telecompaper. June 28, 1995. Archived from the original on February 23, 2020. Retrieved February 23, 2020.