By Abhijit Chatterjee and Navneeth Kannan, General Instrument Corporation
The advanced set-top terminals of today are characterized by extensive software content. They provide a multitude of features to the subscriber at home via a variety of applications. The demand for new and enhanced applications is growing as cable operators and subscribers are discovering new facets of usability of the Set-top terminal. Smooth co-ordination between applications and the need to have more applications than a costeffective memory model can support are two problems that face set-top software designers. This paper describes one implementation of an Application Manager based on user-input to solve the first problem and a Demand-based application retrieval system to solve the second problem. The Application Manager and Transient Application Server have turned out to be successful tools around which many applications have been built in the product-line of Advanced Network Systems group in GI.