Acorn Online Media
Online Media
A company formed in August 1994 by Acorn Computer Group plc to exploit the ARM RISC in television set-top box decoders. They planned to woo British Telecommunications plc to use the box in some of its video on demand trials.
The "STB1" box was based on an ARM8 core with additional circuits to enable MPEG to be decoded in software - possibly dedicated instructions for interpolation, inverse DCT or Huffman table extraction. A prototype featured audio MPEG chips, Acorn's RISC OS operating system and supported Oracle Media Objects and Microword. Online planned to reduce component count by transferring functions from boards into the single RISC chip.
The company was origianlly wholly owned by Acorn but was expected to bring in external investment.
[Article by nobody@tandem.com cross-posted from tandem.news.computergram, 1994-07-07].
In 1996 they releasd the imaginatively titled "Set Top Box 2" (STB20M) with a 32 MHz ARM 7500 and 2 to 32 MB RAM. There was also a "Set Top Box 22".
http://www.khantazi.org/Archives/MachineLst.html#STB1. http://www.mcmordie.co.uk/acornhistory/riscpc700.shtml. http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/NC.html.