Matsushita Partners For TV Shopping, Trading
Matsushita Electric Industrial, the world's biggest consumer electronics maker, said it will work with interactive television software maker OpenTV to develop and market hardware and software to enable shopping and securities trading through digital TV. The software, which will comply with the Multimedia Home Platform standard being developed in Europe, will offer owners of digital televisions the ability to view interactive TV programming and transfer data between TV set-top boxes, television networks and other services. As early as the end of this year, Matsushita will begin including the software in its current and future set-top boxes, consumer devices which can access the Internet without using a personal computer. Matsushita is hoping to boost sales of its set-top boxes in Europe, where MHP is being developed as the technology standard to transfer data to digital TVs, Matsushita Electric spokesman Setsuo Mizoguchi said. Though Matsushita, which sells its products under the Panasonic brand name, doesn't think MHP will become a global standard, the company thinks it stands a good chance of increasing its exposure in the European market. ""We see this collaboration with OpenTV as a real opportunity to accelerate the deployment of MHP, as well as to strengthen our digital TV global platform technology,"" Kunio Nakamura, Senior Managing Director of Matsushita Electric, said in a prepared statement. Matsushita Electric began selling set-top units containing OpenTV's software in 1998, Mizoguchi said. OpenTV's software, which lets people shop directly from their TV or respond to ads as they see them, runs on 4.5 million digital set-top boxes worldwide. Twenty-four television networks worldwide use OpenTV's software, including British Sky Broadcasting Group and News Corporation. Currently, OpenTV's proprietary software technology only runs applications developed specifically for their software, but the agreement to include compatibility with MHP software will eventually allow for a wider array of applications to run on OpenTV set-tops as well as those using software from other companies. OpenTV raised $173 million in a November 1999 public offering. Its shares have gained 83 percent since January 2000. It also sold shares in October 1999 to America Online, General Instrument, Liberty Digital, News Corp., Time Warner and Sun Microsystems to gain partners for entertainment and news content and set-top box technology. OpenTV's stock climbed $16, or about 11 percent, to $163 in morning trading on the news. Source: Bloomberg News News.com's Jim Davis contributed to this report.