30th March 1995 Press Release Cambridge Consumers Move Into 21st Century with Interactive TV Peter Bonfield, Chairman and Chief Executive of ICL, the leading information technology company, will today switch on the new server for Phase 2 of the Cambridge interactive TV Trial. Phase 2 of the Trial will see more homes, along with schools and businesses, connected with a wider range of interactive services. These services available on demand already include films and documentaries, news and weather, home shopping and previews of forthcoming broadcast channels. The trial will run through 1995, developing into a commercial market trial later in the year. The trial, which will initially be to 100 households in the Cambridge area, will be extended to 250 later in the year as the number of services grow. Delivering services to this number of households requires a high performance interactive server. The ICL PimSERVER (Parallel Interactive Media Server), with the vast storage capacity needed to deliver video services, is an innovative development from ICL's operation in Manchester. A fully populated PimSERVER will support a population of up to 7000 connected homes, with around 2000 homes accessing the service concurrently. These households can be watching a variety of material, including any one of 1000 different feature length films (equivalent to 1.4 Terabytes of disk storage) stored on the server. Peter Bonfield comments "The multimedia revolution and the global information highway open up opportunities for totally new businesses and consumer lifestyles. ICL is determined to be at the forefront of this revolution, and this trial is a key step in that process. The innovative technology which we bring to this trial will be at the heart of the interactive TV services which will dominate the future of the world's entertainment industry." Mike Raynor, Vice President, Marketing for ICL High Performance Systems comments "We believe ICL is the only European supplier of the parallel technology required to enable cost effective delivery of interactive services. Clearly the potential market for media servers of this kind could run into many thousands of systems in the years ahead." Malcolm Bird from Online Media comments "The iTV trial here in Cambridge is taking on growing importance as it becomes a catalyst for iTV service development and a living proof of wide area ATM use. We are pleased to welcome ICL to the consortium bringing mature scalable server technology allowing us to grow the trial rapidly. The distributed intelligence of our Set-top products along with the ATM network is proving to be a highly effective solution" Kim Spence-Jones, Managing Director SJ Research, "From the outset the Cambridge Trial has focused on developing commercially viable solutions. The inclusion of the ICL server technology will help tremendously with achieving this objective." Hugo Davenport, Chairman of the Cambridge Cable Group of companies comments "I welcome ICL's participation in this trial, especially as it is one of the few suppliers currently able to provide media servers of the enormous capacity which will be required to support large numbers of concurrent users for this type of application." Pat O'Hearn, Managing Director Advanced Telecommunications Modules Limited ('ATML'), said "Our collaboration in Phase 1 of the trial has gone extremely well and has shown that ATM is the obvious choice for delivering a wide range of on-demand services to the home. We are pleased with the continuing expansion of the trial in both scale and content as this clearly demonstrates that ATML's low cost, scalable products are ideally suited to the commercial demands of interactive television." Background The Cambridge digital interactive TV trial, launched in September 1994, involves installing a set-top box, which looks like a smaller version of a video recorder, to the cable feed to the television set in people's homes. Users then have access to a variety of interactive services from a control centre in Cambridge. The 'on-demand' services available include movies, education, games, news from ITN, documentaries and weather from Anglia TV. Subscribers can access and control these as and when they wish using a remote control. ICL's PimSERVER (Parallel Interactive Media Server), is a derivative of the massively parallel processing technology used within ICL's high performance relational database server, the GOLDRUSH MegaSERVER. The system, which has been delivered with 200 Gigabytes of disk storage, will allow the number of user channels to be increased as the active user base grows. Cambridge Trial Consortium - Background Information The Trial members are : ICL ICL is a leading information technology company specialising in systems integration in selected markets. Operating in over 80 countries with 23,000 employees, it generated revenues of #2.6 billion in 1994. Through its service and product businesses, ICL also provides its customers with long term support and access to the widest range of technology. SJ Research SJ Research specialises in low-cost ATM switching, especially in so-called 'Hybrid Fibre-Coax' networks. In such networks the data is distributed to the kerb-side cabinets ('little green boxes') through optical fibres and delivered to the home on low-cost coax cable. The company was formed fifteen years ago and has been involved in computer networking since its early days. It has been working on ATM networking for the past four years and to date has sold more than 3000 ATM switches. ATML Advanced Telecommunications Modules Limited ('ATML') designs, develops and markets a range of low cost, high speed asynchronous transfer mode ('ATM') products for PC workgroups and video-on-demand applications. A complete client/server and multimedia internetworking solution is provided by a family of 25 Mbps switches, plug and play PC network interface cards and multi-stream media-server. The Company's technology leadership is founded on developments by engineers at Cambridge University and at the Olivetti Research Laboratory. ATML has offices in Cambridge England and Sunnyvale California. Cambridge Cable Cambridge Cable Limited is part of the Cambridge Cable group of companies, comprising Cambridge Cable, Anglia Cable, East Coast Cable and Southern East Anglia. Backed by Comcast and Singapore Telecom, the companies are currently building an advanced communications network which will provide cable television and telephony services to homes and businesses within the four East Anglia franchise areas. The Cambridge Cable Group was formed in 1988 and has grown to be one of the region's largest employers. The group's first cable television subscriber was connected in June 1991 and the first telecommunications services provided in late 1992. Online Media Online Media is a member of the Acorn Computer Group and has the full strategic backing from Acorn's parent company, Olivetti. Established in July 1994, Online Media provides innovative, affordable, interactive television products in hardware, enabling software and services to meet the requirements of the markets emerging from the information superhighway. The company focuses on cost competitive designs, which exploit emerging standards, and its first product, an intelligent digital set-top box, is already in production and in use. Alongside hardware products, Online Media offers authoring systems, services and consultancy in service development, as well as other areas. All Online Media designs are available under licence.