David. Here's the MVP article. It's been posted before. The Multimedia Monitor article is a reprint, with a different title......................................
C-Cube Eyes Sub-$300 MPEG-1 Encoding Kit
C-Cube Microsystems Inc. [CUBE] is driving down the price of PC video-capture technology low enough so that peripheral vendors can sell MPEG-1 encoding packages in the consumer market for less than $300. [MULTIMEDIA MONITOR, PAY PER VIEW, 474 words, $3.00]
C-CUBE SLASHES FMV CAPTURE COST: AVERMEDIA AND VIDEONICS HOPE FOR HOME RUN WITH PC PERIPHERAL THAT SITS OUTSIDE THE BOX
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June 16, 1997
C-Cube Microsystems Inc. [CUBE] is driving down the price of PC video-capture technology low enough so that peripheral vendors can sell MPEG-1 encoding packages in the consumer market for less than $300.
This level of technology isn't being marketed nationally by any major company today for less than about $800. Video-capture technology today is the domain of professionals who typically buy cards bundled into big-ticket, bells-and-whistles-laden editing systems.
At the heart of the MVP technology is C-Cube's CLM411 MPEG-1 encoder. It's the same chip used in Data Translation's Broadway Pro video card. Bringing analog video into the PC via the parallel port as MPEG-1 with a compression ratio of 200:1, the encoder can capture NTSC video at 30 frames per second and PAL video at 25 frames per second. The image capture technology also supports JPEG compression.
Clint Chao, C-Cube's director of marketing. said C-Cube's MPEG-1 can bring video into the PC at a rate of 3 Mbps, and he expects faster data rates to be implemented in next-generation MVPs featuring SCSI, USB and 1394.
C-Cube hopes to spark a whole new category of external PC products called MPEG video peripherals (MVP), which let users bring analog video into their desktops for use in video e-mail and other applications. MPEG-1 video is very applicable to the Internet, where bandwidth constraints make delivery of MPEG-2 video impossible.
AVerMedia Technologies Inc. and Videonics Inc. [VDNX] plan to sell MVPs incorporating the C-Cube chip this summer. FutureTel Inc. also is expected to buy the chip, but company executives would not confirm product plans.
Arthur Pait, director of sales and marketing for AVerMedia, believes his company can sell close to 10,000 units of its MPEG Wizard when the $299 unit ships in August. Once the company can bring down the price to $199, he projects monthly sales of 20,000 to 30,000 units.
Pait hopes to have a prototype of the Wizard up and running at PC Expo this week in New York. "The software is buggy, but we're trying to get it working," he said.
Snappy Sales
Vendors are basing their sales expectations, in part, on the success of the Snappy, the Play Inc. still-image capture peripheral that has an installed base of more than 100,000 units. The Snappy was introduced in March 1995, and Play upgraded the product last October.
"We used the Snappy as a market data point," Chao said. " They took the concept of the frame grabber, made it very consumer friendly and hit a home run."
Should MVPs take off as expected, sales of Snappy--which sells for less than $200--could sink.
Taking an aggressive stance, C-Cube is selling the CLM-4111 for $35 in volume.
Videonics plans to debut its Python MVP and sell it for less than $400 when it hits the market in late summer. Dean Tucker, Videonics director of desktop marketing, said the Python comes with a custom ASIC to improve video performance but would not elaborate on how the chip works.
Videonics' Tucker believes ease of use will make Python stand out. "With the click of a button you can create a streaming video web [or] launch a video e-mail," he said. "It's dead simple."
Both AVerMedia and Videonics are bundling their video products with authoring tools they say are easy enough for non-enthusiasts to use.
(AVerMedia, 510/770-9899; C-Cube, 408/944-6300; Videonics, 408/866-8300.) |
