Motorola Celebrates 50 Million Digital Cable Set-Tops Shipped and 10 Years of Digital Cable Leadership

HORSHAM, PA — In 1996, the very first digital cable networks were built, and with them came the promise of a new world of home entertainment: Digital television with crystal-clear stereo sound and high-definition picture quality, thousands of movies and shows available on-demand, interactive on-screen applications such as program guides, and more – all delivered to a digital cable receiver in the living room.

Today, Motorola, Inc (NYSE:MOT) celebrates the shipment of the company’s 50 millionth digital cable set-top, and reflects on ten years of invention for the connected home that has turned our original promise into a reality.

“From the start, it was evident the digital cable network would be a disruptive technology, which is why we dedicated our very best minds to innovate around the set-top and the network. They responded by getting the world’s first commercial digital cable set-top into the field,” explains John Burke, Motorola corporate vice president and responsible for the company’s digital video portfolio. “Ten years later, we’re still using the fundamentals learned by that team to help the cable industry enable new types of entertainment experiences for their customers – inside and outside of their homes.”

General Instrument Corporation, later acquired by Motorola, shipped the Digital Consumer Terminal (DCT) Model 1000 set-top to customers in October of 1996. The product included an internal tuner that could receive the then-standard analog video signals traveling through a cable network, and a second tuner which could descramble the newer, video signals. The DCT-1000 also supported QAM-64 (quadrature amplitude modulation), the standard at the time for network transmission.

Today, Motorola has deployed over 2,060 digital video headends worldwide, and offers the broadest portfolio of products and solutions for the cable industry. Motorola’s DCT line of set-tops includes the flagship DCT6400 series, a dual-tuner, high-definition digital video recorder capable of home media networking, and the compact DCT700, a slimline cable receiver that bring basic interactive applications to over 1 million households throughout the United States. Within the total of 50 million, Motorola has delivered over 8 million high-definition capable receivers and over 5 million digital video recorders to cable operators worldwide.

For the company’s outstanding achievement in the development of consumer digital set-tops, Motorola received an Emmy® Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 2002.