Scientific-Atlanta Inc has formed PowerTV Systems Inc as a majority-owned subsidiary to work on a product for the television set-top box market – but despite the name, the product is nothing to do with the IBM Corp RISC processor, although it will run on the PowerPC and the Motorola Inc 68000. Instead, PowerTV will be a processor-independent set-top box operating system. It is being designed to run in small amounts of memory to minimise terminal cost, and will be real-time, multitasking, pre-emptive and portable across processor types. Adequate support for graphics and development tools is also promised. The architecture will be scalable from puny to powerful processors so that additional features can be added as more complex applications evolve, and will be standard in all digital home communications terminals manufactured by Scientific-Atlanta. The company will also license the PowerTV operating system to other suppliers of home communications terminals, and it is aimed at telephone and satellite environments as well as cable television. Supporters include Oracle Corp, Sybase Inc and Scala Inc, which are adapting their multimedia authoring tools to run under the PowerTV environment. Tool kits and support for application developers will be available early next year, and PowerTV has formed working relationships with Compagnie des Machines Bull SA’s Diab Data AB and with Software Development Systems Inc for C and C++ application development tools – Diab Data specialises in compilers for embedded applications these days, and Software Development Systems is a supplier of debugging tools. Sybase is developing a version of Gain Interplay optimised for PowerTV and Oracle is implementing Oracle Media Objects and Oracle Media Net, which enables set-top devices to access multimedia content from the Oracle Media Server for PowerTV.