[itvt] Interview: Bill Sheppard, Chief Digital Media Officer, Client Software Group, Sun Microsystems

[itvt]’s Tracy Swedlow recently interviewed Bill Sheppard, chief digital media officer of the Client Software Group at Sun Microsystems. Audio of the interview is below, followed by a transcript that has been slightly edited for length.

Sheppard explains why Sun is bullish on tru2way; provides an overview of the new JavaFX language and its significance to the interactive and broadband TV spaces; discussed interactive TV projects currently underway on Java.net; outlines his view of the future relationship between tru2way and Blu-ray; and much, much more.

To listen to the interview, click here:

Swedlow: The name of your group is the Client Software Group, but you called it something the other day…

Sheppard: Java software is what we are tending towards now.

Swedlow: There’s so much to talk about. tru2way is very much in the news. Before we go into what is happening with that technology, can you give me an understanding of your responsibilities and what your group does, just so we can provide that kind of context.

Sheppard: Sure. I’m part of the group at Sun that owns and manages Java technology. Sun invented that back in the mid- to late-’90’s. My responsibility is really to drive the business and strategy around Java in television and other digital media devices, such as Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, portable media players, and other devices that it might find its way into.

I work with the cable operators, the movie studios, the device manufacturers, the content-authoring-tool companies, pretty much anyone who’s in the ecosystem of developing interactive television applications and services and trying to push that ecosystem forward. I’ve been doing that for over 11 years now. Two weeks after I joined Sun in late ’97, we held a set-top summit where a bunch of the companies who, at the time, were active in this, including Disney and General Instruments–which is now Motorola–and OpenTV…These companies and some others came to Sun. They’d heard about this Java thing and they felt that it might make sense as a platform for interactive television. Starting from there, we went off, created a specification–Java TV–and then started working with standards bodies including DVB and CableLabs and others.

11 years later, finally, we’ve got something on the order of 25 million set-tops and devices out there running Java. That number should increase dramatically over the next few years as Blu-ray continues to show very rapid growth. tru2way, IPTV, all of the markets now are developing nicely. Here at 10-plus years later, we’re finally seeing the adoption and the innovation in applications and services which we all had been looking for for a long time.

Swedlow: So many technologies for interactive TV have come and gone and this was introduced, as you said, 10-plus years ago. In light of the recent announcement of massive layoffs from Sun, this is still obviously a working group. This is still something that seems to be a priority for Sun.

The two-part question is: Why do you think that this technology for Sun has had such staying power, and are you surprised that they are continuing to support that in light of the recent layoffs?

Sheppard: I’m not surprised, because it’s very visible that the market is now tipped, and Blu-ray is a success by most standards, and tru2way is now in the marketplace. So we had a number of years…Four or five years ago, it was a little more tenuous, where it wasn’t clear that cable would ever actually deploy OCAP. I’ll use the terms “OCAP” and “tru2way” interchangeably.

Swedlow: Believe me, we’ve all wondered whether or not it was actually going to launch for years. Just last week, Mark Hess announced at CTAM that they already had boxes in the field but that they would be there by the end of the year…millions and millions of enabled boxes. But that was for EBIF. That wasn’t necessarily for tru2way. You said you already have 25 million enabled set top boxes. Are those boxes ready to work?

Sheppard: They’re in the field. So, of that, roughly 15 million are Blu-ray players, including the PS3. The other 10 million are various OCAP or MHP or GEM-IPTV…They’re all alphabet soup…They’re all members of the same family of Java-based global TV standards.

Swedlow: So that’s international distribution…?

Sheppard: Right. Korea, for instance, most people have digital TV there, have a Java-based set top box, whether it’s satellite, cable, or over-the-air, or IPTV. Italy, 90% of the population in Italy gets over-the-air TV and the government has made MHP…Multimedia Home Platform, the original Java-based standard, has been made the standard environment for the government to deliver applications and services to the population in Finland, Germany, Spain, and France. So you’ve got bits and pieces around the world, but the actual interesting volume is going to come from the US, now that cable has finally started.

So within Sun, I think the commitment to see this through has been in part looking at the mobile phone market where, now, 90% of all handsets in the world shipped today include a Java VM. That’s incredible reach for developers for applications, so that’s literally billions and billions of phones…

[For instance] every BlackBerry is inherently a Java device–not just capable of running Java, but the OS is Java. All the other phones–the free featured phones in China and Russia up to smartphones, whether running Windows Mobile or Symbian or Palm–Java is on 90% of them. That’s hugely important from a developer standpoint and for Sun because it gives us the ability to help be on the leading edge of that innovation.

So, what do application developers require? How can we provide the software infrastructure to support that? We recognize that TV is in a position to follow the mobile phone market. So, given the standards that are in place, over time it won’t be 90% but it’s certainly reasonable to assume that the majority of TV’s in the US would be Java-based–and in the rest of the world. Large, large numbers–hundreds of millions–of TVs globally. That’s a pretty attractive market to have your software be a part of…

Swedlow: How long will it take us to reach that point where it really is going to pay off for you? Or is it already paying off for you if you’re working with the cable operators now?

Sheppard: It pays the bills right now. Sun’s business model today is…most of the devices which have a VM, we get a small royalty–measured in cents, not dollars–for that device. There are 100 million TV’s sold annually in the US, so if tru2way were in half of those, then that’s a reasonable…Again, it keeps the lights on.

For Sun, the important revenue comes from selling the infrastructure: selling the servers, the software, the databases and all that. Virtually every application you can think of on your TV is going to require a lot of backend technology to support it.

Think of interactive advertising. If Ford puts a commercial on the air and wants you to be able to click a button and have information sent to you or have a coupon sent to you that you can take for a free rental car or something, there’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure required to allow the cable operator, Ford, the local dealer and all the parties involved to know who you are, and make that experience available to you, without compromising your privacy at the same time. That requires all sorts of identity management software, the servers to run that, the confederated management of a Comcast database versus Ford’s database…

 

There aren’t that many companies that make servers. There aren’t that many companies that make databases. For example, BDLive.com is a site that will host a lot of the content for Blu-ray discs. The new Neil Young disc coming out, for instance–his archives collection is due in January. Every time you put in one of those discs, you may see a message on the screen that says, “New Photos, New Videos. Click here to accept,” and it will download that to your persistent storage and that will become a part of the experience. There needs to be a bunch of hosting infrastructure to support that, so BDLive.com is a site that the studios could use, or content providers could use, to host that and to provide the Web services that the disc content needs to get that. We are hosting BDLive.com so it’s running on Sun infrastructure. They can use our application servers and databases and that sort of thing to actually build that infrastructure, but we’re not doing the specialized application work. That stuff is running on top of our more generic platforms.

By the same token, for advanced advertising, there are companies in this space who do specific advertising work to do the addressable ads or to allow the different triggers and things that you need to actually allow a viewer to interact. We don’t do that level of software, but that all requires the infrastructure which would use that. So it’s very much a partnership arrangement.

Swedlow: It’s a Blu-ray story–very important–but I actually want to discuss cable, the specific tru2way efforts. There’s a lot of attention being paid to EBIF, which is a technology which people are assuming is going to be out first, and then when boxes are more ready, that tru2way will support more advanced applications. Canoe Ventures is now starting to really be public about what they’re doing. Are you working with them? They’ve been public about their focus on EBIF, but are they going to be part of the tru2way family and what are you doing with them?

Sheppard: Canoe has certainly talked about standards like tru2way being critical to their ability to deliver the advertising experiences that they were created for. EBIF today makes sense because you’ve got something between 30 million and 40 million set-tops out there in the US, the vast majority of which are not tru2way but are capable of supporting EBIF. So if you’re going to put something in the market today, EBIF is your best chance to do that in a way which can be deployed to a critical mass of people.

tru2way is approaching two million out in the US today, mostly on Time Warner. Comcast is now working with Panasonic. If you live in Chicago or Denver, you can go to Circuit City or Ultimate Electronics or other retailers and buy a 42- or 50-inch Panasonic plasma TV which has tru2way built in, hook it up to your cable connection, plug in a CableCARD, and it will look and act exactly as one of their set-top boxes would, including the ability to see their guide, order pay-per-view, video-on-demand, all the other services they can provide. But those numbers aren’t anywhere near what EBIF can support and there’s still a lot to learn about tru2way, because it just hasn’t been widely deployed yet and most of the operators have not yet deployed it.

From Canoe Ventures’ standpoint, it makes sense to initially target EBIF, and EBIF will run well on tru2way. So starting with that and doing the basics, taking advantage of the basic capabilities of EBIF, then building on that to deliver a more elaborate experiences that tru2way can support as you have a critical mass of boxes out there is, I think, an approach that makes a lot of sense.

Swedlow: [Is this new breed of standalone set-top boxes–i.e. set-top boxes that connect to the Internet rather than a cable service–from companies such as ZeeVee and Sezmi, going to incorporate Java technology?]

Sheppard: The newer what I’ll call over-the-top boxes–ones that primarily connect to the Internet and then your TV and provide that Internet media experience on your TV–generally today are not running Java in part because it is purely an Internet box. If you look at sites like Hulu or YouTube, they are generally using Flash on the PC as a way of delivering that video experience. In most cases, they’re just taking the stream directly and not running Flash either and wrapping their own user interface around that.

There was certainly an interest at the NewTeeVee conference last week. There was a VP from Disney who said one of the challenges for them in delivering to devices is that there aren’t a lot of standards once you move beyond the cable set-top box. So that’s one of the areas where I think there’s a lot of opportunity. For Sun, it’s to take the work we’ve done in tru2way and Blu-ray, and take that Java platform, move that into these other devices.

One of the key pieces of technology I think that will make that a lot easier is JavaFX, which we’ll be releasing next month…JavaFX is a rich environment, analogous to Flash or Silverlight on the PC, which really targets the much more creative community as opposed to the hardcore developer community. Your average Flash developer doesn’t probably know how to write code, whereas an average Java developer today does need to write code. JavaFX is a cross-platform layer on top of Java that is in preview now. It will be released for the desktop on December 2nd, released for mobile early next year at Mobile World Conference in March, I believe. Then for TV…

Swedlow: TV of Tomorrow Show?

Sheppard: It won’t be ready by this year’s TV of Tomorrow Show.

Swedlow: Why don’t we show something anyway?

Sheppard: Maybe TV of Tomorrow in 2010.

Swedlow: No, you need to have a little alpha preview…

Sheppard: I’ll see what we can do. What JavaFX will do is sit on top of Java that’s already in the box and provide a scripting language which is much more accessible for the creative community–but more importantly, work with the full suite of workflow tools that you usually see in this space, the Adobe Creative Suite, Illustrator, that kind of tool.

The developers who today might be using Flash or Flex would be able to develop to JavaFX, but they get the best of both worlds. They get this rich environment on top that’s easy to develop to, but it’s fully integrated with the Java VM underneath. There are many things that Flash is not very good at. It can be very difficult to write certain types of applications in Flash because it was designed as a presentation engine. Java is a much more general-purpose VM so there’s really no limitation on what you can create.

Having FX on top and then the VM underneath makes it possible to do a lot of the heavy lifting under the covers while creating this great user experience on top. That’s a very long-winded way of saying that that’s the perfect environment for the Hulus of the world to target, across the desktop and the mobile phone and the TV set-top box, with a very similar user experience that builds in all the aspects that they’re presenting.

Swedlow: Are you saying that this is an application that runs on tru2way so that Hulu could develop to a tru2way-enabled box? Or is this a completely different platform?

Sheppard: FX can sit on top of tru2way, so FX is essentially a runtime environment that can run on an existing VM. It’s absolutely possible to put that on top of tru2way. Again, we’re speaking about where we intend to go. Today it’s not sitting there so it wouldn’t be likely that Hulu would start authoring that.

In fact, the Adobe MAX conference is going on a few blocks down the street as we speak, and we are one of the sponsors, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect: Sun Java sponsoring the Adobe Flash conference.

 

Swedlow: Why are you sponsoring it?

Sheppard: Because it’s a great opportunity to talk to the developers who are in that world and demonstrate what we think is a better environment. Once it’s proven itself in the eyes of the developers, which we think will happen very quickly after launch, it becomes a very compelling story. Java is deployed on essentially the same number of desktops as Flash, but it’s been considered kind of a clunky, heavier-weight environment. As of the latest release, and with FX, it’s much leaner, start-up times are much slower, and it offers some really interesting abilities like just dragging an application out of the browser onto the desktop, and it becomes completely separated from the browser.

Swedlow: You said start-up times are slower. Did you mean start-up times are faster?

Sheppard: Faster. Yes. Think of any time you have a Flash thing within a Web page: occasionally, there’s a control there where you can pop it out of the Web page or at least put it into its own window. More often than not, it’s kind of stuck to the browser. There are a lot of times where I’d love to take a media player that comes in on top of Flash and get that out of the browser, put it up in the corner of the screen, and then leave the rest of the space for doing whatever I’m doing. With FX, that just automatically is there. You can just grab it right out of the browser onto the desktop, whether or not it was specifically designed to do that.

Things like that will make it a very compelling environment for the over-the-top TV experience, and leveraging the fact that Java is already in all these mobile phones and on these PC’s and will be in so many TV’s makes that, I think, the path of least resistance.

Swedlow: I’m not here to help you form your strategy, but Flash is popular; there are a lot of people out there who know how to develop it. If somebody wanted to combine the benefits of JavaFX with maybe something that has already been developed in Flash, some legacy assets or something like that, why not be able to incorporate it?

Sheppard: There are some tools out there. I recently saw that a tool was released for Blu-ray authoring that you author in Flash and this tool converts the Flash code into Java code and gives you a complete BD-J application. Usually with that kind of solution, there’s a performance hit, so I don’t know from a practical standpoint whether you can author with complete freedom in the Flash environment and then expect everything to work just as you had authored it, or whether there are limitations from a performance standpoint that mean you have to really constrain yourself. We think the best of the Flash community is the authoring experience, and we thought that the limitation of the Flash environment is the runtime player in the device. What we’re trying to do is basically provide that authoring experience that Flash provides, but put it on top of a more robust, more powerful VM and one that happens to be in billions and billions of devices already.

Swedlow: That’s great to know. I’m glad to hear about that new development, obviously want to track that. Let’s go back to something we have already announced or we discussed in our newsletter, which is the Java.net community. Can you talk a little bit about what’s going on there, the kinds of interactive TV applications that people are tooling around with? Obviously it’s still in an incubation mode, I would think, to some extent, but there are other applications that are seeing their way into Blu-ray players. Then let’s move onto Blu-ray after that.

Sheppard: Java.net is intended to be a general-purpose hosting site for any sort of open source project that anyone wants to develop. If you think of SourceForge, which is where there’s a tremendous number of great applications and projects, Java.net is the equivalent environment for Java-based applications or technologies. We host the open source VM itself at Java.net, so one of the projects is called phoneME. We have open-sourced the entire VM and anyone can go take that code and do whatever they want with it as long as they abide by the GPL license requirements for that.

Swedlow: What does ME stand for?

Sheppard: Mobile Edition. The project where that code is hosted is phoneME. It’s phoneME, but that’s also the same VM used for TV. We have a couple different communities for TV developers at Java.net. One is HD Cookbook. HD Cookbook was started by Bill Foote. He’s one of the co-authors of the High Definition DVD and Blu-ray Cookbook, which is the first book that was published that gave authoring guidance for how to go off and build content for HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Unfortunately, the HD-DVD portion of the book is now completely obsolete, since Toshiba and Microsoft have abandoned that technology.

Bill started HD Cookbook as a Java.net project, and then we assigned a team of developers at Sun to go off and create a set of tools and scripts and documentation so that anyone can go off and author Blu-ray code–not have to go off and buy any sort of commercial tools, not have any outlay, but just download NetBeans, or you could use Eclipse. There’s a bunch of tools if you’re doing code signing and setting up the directories in a way that the Blu-ray players require the disc to recognize the format. We’ve got code there that allows you to burn just one disc, since CD media is still fairly expensive. Rather than burning a disc every time you want to try something out, they created an environment where you burn a disc, put an application on it, and then that application will connect to the Internet and you can put your actual code at a Web site, and the Blu-ray player will suck that down over the Internet rather than having to burn a new disc every time.

There are a lot of different tools and an active developer forum where people are asking questions about how do I do this? what does this part of the spec mean?–that sort of thing. HD Cookbook is enabling today the Blu-ray developer community to go off and innovate, figure out what’s possible, and just play with it and create new things.

Swedlow: Are we seeing anything they’re doing that takes advantage of the greater amount of real estate on the screen, the capability of the bandwidth of HD?

Sheppard: A lot of that community is actually part of the professional authoring community. A lot of what’s going on there is finding its way into major releases. One of the big pieces we have there is GRIN, which is the graphical interactivity framework–so it’s a whole scene-graph kind of environment for building menus and other on-screen graphics without having to write a bunch of low-level code. So that has found its way into a number of commercially released titles. Again, that’s all open source, so anyone can just use that as they see fit…

Another Java.net project which is pretty interesting is sponsored by CableLabs. They’re in the process of working with us and others to create an OCAP or tru2way reference implementation, the idea being that you’ll have a full PC-based OCAP environment that anyone can download. Then you can develop apps against that and run them on your PC.

Also, most of that environment will be available in source code, so if you are a TV manufacturer or set-top manufacturer and you want to start porting tru2way to your device but you’re not ready to enter into a commercial agreement with one of the middleware providers, you can grab this source code and port it on your own and get well down the road to developing a commercial implementation of tru2way or OCAP. It’s designed to be an enabler for tru2way and again, kick start…sort of the catalyst for the market to give developers more access to the platform itself, give the device manufacturers more access to the implementation, and ease how you get these things into the market. That’ll be on the OpenCable Java.net project.

There are also message forums there, and other tools for developing OCAP code…There’s other stuff at the OpenCable project for developers today, but the actual reference implementation itself will not be there. JavaOne would be an ideal time to make it available if that can happen, which is in May this year.

Swedlow: Several months down the road…

Sheppard: Yes, but not too many…There have been developer contests hosted there as well. There was an OCAP developer contest last year from CableLabs, and, several years before that, one from Sun. There was a Blu-ray developer contest a couple years ago. Java.net is an obvious place to host that kind of thing as well.

Anyone can create their own Java.net project. This isn’t just something that we or some other major entity has to create, but anyone with an idea can go off, create a Java.net project, and start to form a community around what they’re doing…

Swedlow: Let’s move on to Blu-ray. Blu-ray isn’t necessarily an obvious interactive TV platform and that’s traditionally been investigated or welcomed into that community, but it is. It really is… What’s happening with Blu-ray? Is it making some kind of transition?

Sheppard: Java is part of every Blu-ray player. It has to be in the player itself regardless of whether it’s a network-connected device or a non-network-enabled player. The disc itself might use Java or might not. The first year or so, there were only three titles released which actually used Java. All of the others used HDMV which is the scripting environment for Java, which is designed to be better than the DVD scripting but nowhere near as capable as BD-J.

It took a long time for those first few discs to be released, because you didn’t have much in the way of tools, you didn’t have a lot of expertise, so it was a lot of pain. Frankly, at that point, the studios were a little bit unsure whether this was going to work, because putting a full Java environment, a riched-out environment, in the player was tremendously more complex than anything that had been done in the past.

It took time, but looking at today, we’re two years and a few months into the format and virtually every major title is now released as a Java title. The authoring companies like Deluxe Digital Studios, who do a lot of authoring for Disney and the other major studios, tell me that they can author a Java-based title faster than they can author a script-based title because they’ve now developed these great libraries of code.

If they build a particular menuing effect or some sort of network access for one title, they can immediately re-use that for the second title and all the ones after that, because Java’s inherently object-oriented. It just lends itself to that kind of re-use and modularization. With a scripting environment, it’s much more difficult to do that, because you don’t have that natural architecture.

Virtually every major title now is released as a Java title, and they’re starting to get a lot more creative with the things they’re doing. The first few titles that were released–they used Java to do semi-interesting menus, but really it was just eye candy. Fox, on a couple of their early titles, put a database on the discs so you could scroll through by keywords or actors. You could bring up the database and click on “explosions,” and it would build a playlist for you of every scene in the movie where a building explodes; or every scene in a particular location or with a certain actor. Maybe mildly amusing but not probably something that’s going to convince someone to buy a Blu-ray player instead of a standard DVD player.

If we look more recently, you’ve got much more elaborate use of this. Disney released “Sleeping Beauty” last month. That was their first BD-Live title and their first platinum title [to be released on Blu-ray]. Disney has a couple dozen movies that are platinum titles. They put them in the vault. They only release them once every 10 years or so, and when they do, it’s a big deal. “Sleeping Beauty” was the first platinum title they’ve released on Blu-ray. It has a ton of extra features in it to really draw their target demographics into the movie.

When you put in the disc, you see Cinderella’s castle as the main feature of the menu and you can choose which is your favorite Disney location…You can set in your preferences your favorite Disney theme park: Disneyland, Disneyworld, Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo…The weather on-screen will reflect the weather at the park that you’ve chosen. If Anaheim is your favorite Disney property, if it’s nighttime, it’ll be dark; if it’s daytime, it’ll be light; if it’s cloudy, if it’s raining, we’ll see all those things on the screen.

I don’t know if this feature actually made it on to the disc; if not, I think you’ll see it in the future: If you’ve been to a Disney property and they took your picture going down Splash Mountain or whatever, then you can go into a certain room in Cinderella’s castle and you’ll see the picture on the wall that they took of you.

Another feature that’s definitely on the disc: if I’m going on a business trip, I can record a video to a Disney Web site with my webcam, upload that, and then when my daughter, the next day after I’ve left, puts in “Sleeping Beauty,” she’ll see a Post-It note on the screen that says, “Message from Daddy. Click on this to view it.” It’ll take you into another room in Cinderella’s castle and you’ll see a TV in there and the video that I recorded for her online will now show up in Cinderella’s castle in “Sleeping Beauty” on the TV…

My four-year-old–other than the fact that she hasn’t yet been exposed to the wonderful world of Disney–would find that very compelling, I think. Certainly, if every day I record a new message for her. From Disney’s standpoint, if it means she’s putting in that disc every day to see the new message from Daddy, that’s a pretty compelling value for Disney as well. It makes it much stickier.

You can extend that idea and think of all the online communities that Disney or Warner or others have. Disney has Club Penguin which is designed to be a safe community for kids to go to and play games and chat and that kid of thing. The fact that that’s hosted on a PC still carries some risk with it: if I had a 10-year-old daughter and she had a PC and I’m in another part of the house, she could certainly find her way from Club Penguin into some other less wholesome part of the Web. On the other hand, you could take that Club Penguin experience, build it as a BD-J component of every Disney release, and instead of interacting on the PC, which is not the safest environment, she could be doing it on the Blu-ray player which is completely safe because, once you put in a disc, nothing else can take over that experience. The player is owned by that disc at the moment that you put it in.

That gives Disney or whomever the opportunity to put that content in the living room instead of wherever the PC happens to be–put it on what’s probably a bigger screen in a rich-media environment and then make that part of the larger Disney community. So combining all those different Disney properties and loyalty points and…all of these things work together all on the Blu-ray player and make for what could be a very sticky platform and ultimately very profitable for Disney.

Swedlow: How well are Blu-ray players selling?

Sheppard: They are selling better than DVD players did at the same point in time. DVD was the most successful consumer release. At this point, Blu-ray is still exceeding it by most measures.

Swedlow: Do you know how many millions?

Sheppard: Yes. I’m trying to think. I believe there’s about five million standalone players worldwide and about 12 million PS3’s or something like that. A good percentage of the PS3’s are being used exclusively or heavily as Blu-ray players. You can’t really separate those two out very much.

This…will be the first holiday season where consumers aren’t confused or sitting on the sidelines because they don’t want to pick the wrong format.

In Japan, 30% of all DVD player sales are now Blu-ray–mostly recorders. In Japan, there’s a strong culture towards recording off the air, so 30% of all Blu-ray and DVD unit sales are now Blu-ray, which is a huge percentage only this far in.

Also, the prices have just dropped dramatically. Today you can find $200 Blu-ray players easily. Everyone predicts that they’ll be $150 come Black Friday and not just second-tier brands. Reports are that the Sony entry-level player, which is a great player–it’s responsive, it’s network connected–will be $179 at Sears and some other places on Black Friday.

Swedlow: To what extent can Blu-ray exist in a tru2way environment? Do they coexist? Do they layer on top of each other? How do the two work together? Can we see Blu-ray exist in an integrated set-top box where you might be able to stick a disc in, in the future, and then be able to incorporate all the benefits that a set-top box delivers…? What’s the future of those two technologies?

Sheppard: There was a huge battle when Blu-ray was being developed as to what the content layer would be. It was originally decided, before Sun was even involved, that it would be Java. Then Microsoft put on a hard lobby to try and displace Java with their HDi technology, which is a markup-based environment, kind of like a browser is specifically designed for media.

We were able to fend that off, and one of the big reasons why Java prevailed in Blu-ray is because the same Java platform that’s in Blu-ray is what tru2way is based on. So you could write content once and have that exact same content run in both places. The fact is, you probably want to tweak it a little bit because every Blu-ray player is high-def, whereas tru2way does not guarantee necessarily high-def. You’d probably want to take advantage of the higher resolution that Blu-ray can offer.

On the remote control, there are a few different buttons mandated on tru2way than mandated on Blu-ray. In reality, you’re not going to take the exact same code and put it in both places most likely, but 95%-plus of the code can be the same.

There’s a natural fit between the content communities. On the movies side, you have movie releases; typically 90 days later, they show up on DVD and on Blu-ray. Then some time after that, they show up on video-on-demand through the cable provider. Today, when you watch video-on-demand…you don’t generally see the bonus content. You just get the movie, but you don’t see the deleted scenes, the gag roll, the making of, all the other stuff. From a technical standpoint, there’s no reason with tru2way that you couldn’t take all the BD-J features, all the bonus features, and make those available through cable.

You look at all the time and effort that goes into offering something like “Iron Man,” which was out recently and was a huge success. “The Dark Knight” comes out in a few weeks and is probably expected to be the first title that sells a million copies upon its release. A lot of work goes into building that extra content for those big blockbuster titles, none of which shows up through video-on-demand. My guess is that if someone can pay $4 to watch the movie or pay $6 to watch the movie and have access to all this other stuff, a lot of people would do that. The fact that Blu-ray and tru2way are based on the same Java platform means, from an authoring standpoint, the studios don’t have to take all of that and redo it for cable. It’s already been done through Blu-ray, so virtually all of that would just move right over.

Going the other direction, I think we can agree that, a few years from now, it’s likely that shows like “Heroes” and “Lost” and “Deal or No Deal” will have some sort of interactive components on the air. You don’t generally see a season compilation disc of “Deal or No Deal” being sold, because, frankly, that’s not so compelling the second time around. “Heroes,” you certainly do have the season package and that’s a hugely popular holiday gift. If there’s interactivity that goes with the show–to find out the backstory, to play games associated with what’s going on–it would make sense that a lot of that should be able to be packaged up and put onto the Blu-ray release as well, so that you have all that extra content there, too.

Content flows both ways, from the studios over to cable, and from the TV community over to the packaged media over to Blu-ray. Having the same platform in both places makes that authoring experience much easier…

From the device standpoint, we are starting to see the worlds come together. The LG and Samsung Blu-ray players now support Netflix streaming built-in, the latest release of both those players. We also hear interest from tru2way set-top providers–so some of the major providers of cable set-tops–who are looking at putting Blu-ray into that device. Potentially, if you put a Blu-ray recorder in there, then it could be a great way to archive in full high-def the shows that you want to not have just on a hard drive.

At the same time, a lot of the same hardware and software is in the box. So the kits that are typically used to build Blu-ray players from Broadcom, from Sigma, from Intel, are the exact same chipsets you generally build a tru2way set-top or integrated TV with. It’s the same Java software stack, generally the same Unix environment, same codec support.

The difference between a Blu-ray player and a tru2way set-top is not very much, when you look at the overall amount of hardware and software in the device. You could certainly make a tru2way set-top that would only be incrementally more expensive to also be a Blu-ray player, and conversely, you could make a Blu-ray player that would only be incrementally more expensive to also be a full cable set-top.

Today, where you have the Netflix streaming client built in, potentially that’s an alternative to cable. We’ve seen the Xbox 360 being used as an IPTV client for Microsoft’s Mediaroom environment. Again, the PS3 is actually already being used as an IPTV environment in Korea for Korea Telecom. They add a small dongle through USB that has the hardware in it needed to connect to the network.

I think we’re definitely going to see this convergence where some of these devices take on multiple personalities and can support both of those environments. So the content is going to cross both markets and the devices themselves will be capable of supporting both markets.

Swedlow: I think that is a truly exciting opportunity right there.

Sheppard: It’s been a long time coming. Anything that reduces boxes in the home…Every time you add a new box, it’s new wiring, new remote control programming. One of the really compelling arguments behind the tru2way TV is you don’t need that extra box there and you don’t have to figure out which VMI versus this and that and you don’t have to program your remote twice.

Swedlow: It’s interesting that Ensequence, which is a well-known player in our industry as an ITV tools developer, came out the year before to say that they’re developing Blu-ray applications.

Sheppard: They’ve got their on-Q Studio, which is a great tool for developing multiplatform. I think they can support–in addition to OCAP–OnRamp, which is a subset of OCAP for low-end devices; they can support OpenTV, as I recall, and a few of the other environments. A year-and-a-half or two years ago, they said, “We’re also going to support Blu-ray with our tools.” And, from their standpoint, it’s not a lot of new code because, again, they can support OCAP and they’ve already got most of the core technology in there.

We’re also seeing some really powerful tools coming from the Blu-ray side of things: tools from companies like Sofatronic with Kaleidoscope and NetBlender with DoStudio; tools that are targeting the Hollywood community. But again, once you’re creating Blu-ray content, it’s a very small step to also create tru2way content. Those companies have said they plan to add on tru2way support once the market is mature enough to support that.

Swedlow: In the past, people have always felt that developing Java code required–and it still does–a large amount of effort, a lot of skill–and a lot of money, because big engineers cost quite a lot to hire. Now you’re announcing the JavaFX platform. Are you making any other initiatives to try to bring the developer base to you so that you start bringing in Internet developers who may not have those kinds of skills? Blu-ray developers are potentially part of that community, as well. How are you trying to evangelize directly to the creative community over and above the other things that you’ve mentioned?

Sheppard: A lot of its grassroots-type stuff. There are events that producers build. They had an event at Pixar last month here in the Bay Area where we had a Blu-ray panel. A number of us spoke and showed the latest content and talked about authoring. The Bay Area doesn’t have the community that LA does when it comes to movies, obviously, but you’ve got Lucas and Pixar up here, which are some pretty good names to have. So events like that, where we’re helping to educate the creative community on the capabilities that are coming, or that are here, on Blu-ray, on tru2way, and on related platforms.

JavaOne is a great place to do that. So, every spring, in May more or less, in San Francisco, we have the world’s largest developer conference: between 15,000 and 20,000 developers, mostly hardcore Java developers. But increasingly, we have more of that creative community. With products like FX and some of the developer tools that are out there, it’s attracting a larger audience from the creative side. We will certainly, with the release of FX, I think, be devoting a much bigger component of JavaOne to the TV market and the rich-media market.

We’re right now in the process of creating the tracks, and the call for papers will go out within a few weeks. We typically have to turn down way more sessions than we can accept. Last year, we did about a day-and-a-half-worth of TV-related content, and usually the session rooms are full for that. We’re looking to expand that more this year.

Also, if you look at the cable conferences like the Cable Show, which will be in April in DC, huge tru2way component to that, so you have a lot of the content community that are demonstrating new applications.

Swedlow: It’s taken a while for them to get to that place, to mention interactive TV in a sentence somewhere.

Sheppard: It has, absolutely.

Swedlow: Clearly, this is the year for them to really start doing it. I’m getting a lot of emails from people who are veterans in the business like yourself, saying with multiple exclamation points: “It’s finally hitting pay dirt!!!”…

Sheppard: Now it’s getting fun, actually being able to go to the store and see a lot of Blu-ray players. tru2way hasn’t hit the Bay Area, but it should within the next six to nine months, I think.

Swedlow: In the most wired city in the world, you would think that these kinds of things are here, but they’re not.

Sheppard: It’s getting fun, and certainly the involvement with the Hollywood community, the Emmy’s, now that there’s an interactive award. I was on the judging panel this past year for that. So that’s really rewarding to see the sorts of creativity that’s coming, as we look at all these different shows and how the creative communities are building these user experiences around the core show content. This is going to be fun for a long time.

Swedlow: Thanks very much, Bill. As always, it’s great to talk with you.

This is Tracy Swedlow, editor-in-chief of InteractiveTV Today, and we’ve been speaking to Bill Sheppard who is chief digital media officer of the Client Software Group of Sun Microsystems. You can find his work at Java.net and Sun.com. He’ll also be appearing at the TV of Tomorrow Show.

Sheppard: Absolutely.

Swedlow: March 10th and 11th. Thanks very much. Talk to you next time.

Sun Microsystems
Java.net