Taking a more European angle on this weeks "Future", comes OpenTV. Formerly known as Thomson Sun Interactive, OpenTV began as a 50/50 joint venture between Sun Microsystems and Thomson Consumer Electronics. The company was spun off in 1996, with Sun reducing its share to less than 15 percent. Sun and OpenTV are now working on a joint design for a set-top box that will include OpenTV's operating system based on Sun's microSPARC and JavaChip architectures. While not yet a major player in the US, OpenTV has a significant head start in the European market. OpenTV products include an operating environment for set-top decoders, a set of tools for developing applications, and utilities to integrate the system into existing program delivery environments. OpenTV enables content developers to develop a single version of an interactive application that can be used on many different networks facilitating the deployment of interactivity with minimal incremental investments. Applicability to Broadcast and Point-Point Environments. OpenTV was designed from the beginning to operate both in a broadcast as well as a point-to-point environment. Tools are provided to transform an application into a timed sequence of modules for in-time delivery over a broadcast medium. The application itself is unaware of the underlying medium used to deliver requested modules.All in all an interesting application, but due to the large licensing fees and limited development infrastructure, formats like the newly upgraded MHEG6 are challenging the "openness" of OpenTV. We'll just have to wait and see. Next week: Philips' three-chip DSB box.