Slow-developing technologies like video-on-demand and digital video recorders may get a boost from a device to be introduced this week by the man who brought Internet surfing to couch potatoes. WebTV founder Steve Perlman will unveil a television set-top box this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that redefines the term "all-in-one." The box, tentatively dubbed the Moxi Media Center, offers music and movies on demand, high-speed Web browsing and interactive TV; device also serves as a satellite or cable receiver, DVD and CD player, as well as a digital video recorder that stores up to 80 hours of TV programs and music.
The Moxi Media Center comes with small add-on units wirelessly networked to the main box. These allow users to record, play back, watch or listen to different video or audio programs or surf the Web on as many as four different TVs and PCs at the same time.
And Perlman's doing it without the backing of Microsoft, which bought out his former company for $425 million in 1997 and then drove him out by refusing to open the WebTV service to anything other than Microsoft's Windows CE operating system.
Instead, Perlman has procured venture capital for his Palo Alto, Calif.-based company from lead investor AOL Time Warner as well as Vulcan Ventures, Cisco Systems, EchoStar Communications and others that have chipped in a combined $67 million in the past year.
Although AOL Time Warner is not ready to announce any formal plans relative to the device, EchoStar is jointly announcing the system with Perlman's Moxi Digital Inc. at their respective booths and press conferences this week. The companies expect to begin market trials of the device by midyear with commercial rollout expected shortly thereafter. Perlman is also in discussions with cable systems, including AOL's Time Warner Cable.
Head of the table
EchoStar's Dish network has quietly become the nation's single biggest provider of digital video recorders, with nearly 1 million customers expected to be using either a satellite receiver that includes a Microsoft DVR/WebTV system called DishPlayer or one of EchoStar's own boxes with a satellite receiver and DVR by midyear. That also makes EchoStar one of the largest distributors of WebTV devices.
In EchoStar, Perlman believes he has his best opportunity to achieve the mass-market penetration that has eluded WebTV, and DVRs like TiVo and ReplayTV. If EchoStar's buyout of DirecTV is approved, EchoStar eventually will need to replace about 10 million boxes in the homes of DirecTV subscribers with a receiver for the EchoStar Dish Network.