Salt Lake City, UT — (press release excerpt) — Philips Digital Networks and Lineo Inc. today announced a partnership to provide Philips' Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) middleware stack running on the Lineo Embedix Digital Media platform for digital TVs and set-top boxes. Lineo and Philips will jointly market, promote, and demonstrate the DVB-MHP-enhanced Linux-based platform to their combined customer… base.

Developed by the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) consortium, the DVB-MHP is an open standard that provides a universal, open interface for the development of multimedia added value applications for digital TV programs and services. The DVB-MHP enables broadcasters to provide content to viewers via advanced set-top boxes, integrated digital TV (iDTV) sets and other receiving devices. The standard introduces viewers to a rich environment of enhanced digital interactive services in the home.

This announcement closely follows the broadband industry's June 2001 announcement of the formation of the TV Linux Alliance, of which Lineo serves as a founding member. As part of the TV Linux Alliance, Lineo joins 23 other industry leaders to define a standards-based Linux environment for the digital set-top market. The Linux environment offers broadband network operators significant benefits, among them lower operating system and development costs, more rapid device driver support for new hardware features, rapid porting of middleware solutions, and easier porting of additional new interactive applications, each of which deliver the latest advanced interactive services more quickly and less expensively.

As part of the partnership, Lineo will provide Philips with Lineo Embedix Digital Media platform integrated with the TV Linux Alliance API when it becomes publicly available from the TV Linux Alliance. By applying its expertise in the development and manufacture of digital set-top boxes and television sets with digital broadcast and home networking technologies, Philips is in a very strong position to successfully implement the DVB-MHP and truly open up the digital market.

The Embedix Digital Media platform is enhanced with drivers and extensions that enable OEMs to rapidly deploy advanced digital programming solutions and services. Embedix Digital Media contains a Linux kernel that has been highly optimized and enhanced with graphic drivers and TV / video extensions to meet digital set-top terminal demands.

 
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