Matsushita and Microsoft do digital video editing.......
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ANALYSIS/ Matsushita,
Microsoft team up on video
software (1)
July 9, 1997
Nikkei English News via Individual Inc. : (Nikkei Industrial Daily,
July 8, 1997)
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Japan's leading manufacturer of
consumer electronics, is pushing to expand its share of the global
markets for personal computers and digital camcorders through an
alliance with Microsoft Corp.
The two companies signed a deal in April to collaborate on
developing video-editing software. Under the agreement,
Matsushita licenses its video-editing technology to Microsoft,
which will then incorporate the software into the next version of
its Windows operating system.
Matsushita's technology, which is based on an industry standard
called DV Format, compresses and decompresses images recorded
by digital camcorders. One senior Microsoft official says the
technology will usher in a new era of PC-based video editing.
Masaaki Kobayashi, a Matsushita official in charge of developing
audiovisual products, says demand for digital camcorders will
surge once consumers start using PCs for editing images from
camcorders. "We'll benefit from growing synergies between PCs
and audiovisual equipment," says Kobayashi.
Matsushita was not the only consumer-electronics maker eager to
forge an alliance with Microsoft in video-editing technology:
Sony Corp. and Sharp Corp. also tried to net the software titan. In
the end, Matsushita succeeded by carefully calibrating its
software to the Windows system.
Initially, Microsoft was not too enthusiastic about Matsushita's
video-editing software. When Matsushita started developing the
software last year, few PCs were powerful enough to run such
applications smoothly.
That situation changed, however, when Intel Corp.'s MMX
technology appeared on the scene. Intel's new MMX Pentium
processor makes it easy to edit video clips on a PC. (More)
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[Copyright 1997, Nikkei America] |
