OpenTV Middleware from NEC

All those set top boxes must be out there somewhere, since we keep hearing about the technological advances made for the devices. The problem with developing an opinion about the gadgets is that there are so many different flavors of them, from the traditional cable access box that sits on your TV to things like WebTV and even TiVo. In the latest development we've heard about for the loosely defined television supplements, NEC let us know that it will showcase a port of OpenTV's EN2 middleware on its uPD6113x chip family at the IBC conference in Amsterdam this week. OpenTV's EN2 is an application that enables interactive digital broadcast TV applications. The app is already a part of NEC's first generation silicon in both set top boxes and personal digital recorders (see where the definition of a "set top box" gets confusing?). The port of OpenTV EN2 to the uPD6113x family lets EN2 make use of the CPU and graphics silicon in the uPD6113x. The uPD6113x uses NEC's Enhanced MultiMedia Architecture (EMMArchitecture2), which the company says makes it a good choice for Personal Digital Recorder applications by offering hard drive support. The uPD6113x family includes support for multiple inputs and DVD. To give you an idea of the kind of numbers being claimed for set top installations, OpenTV says it has more than 18.2 million set-top deployments worldwide.