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 [email protected] 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>.

   (2007-11-12)