Richard, the following is an earlier post of yours. Do you know why Mark said that Innovacom will help Cube and not compete with it. If it was mentioned earlier, I apologize, but when was it announced that this chip will be a real time encoder. Is this really going to used for broadcast encoding? I am certainly no expert, but the stuff I have read states that it takes billions of instructions per second to do real time encoding. That's asking alot of one chip.
"I also listened to the call. Very good.
Here is what I got out of it:
The first product that will be shipped in two weeks is a software tool
that helps people develop software applications that
will be able to work on top of the new chip.
They have already built drivers for Windows 95 and NT.
First engineering samples will be available in Dec.
First shipments early Q2 of 97 (not 2/2/97).
The main novelty of their design is a better method for motion estimation.
The idea is to predict where an object in the picture will be
in the next several frames.
The quality of MPEG2 is much better than people normally
see on TV, close to HDTV.
Many companies make MPEG2 decoders.
Only a few make encoders, e.g., CUBE, IBM, Toshiba.
CUBE uses 13 chips, which makes the encoder much
larger and more expensive than Innovacom's.
Innovacom's chip will fit into current Telco boxes, unlike
the larger encoders of competitors.
Initially, the customers will be companies.
In the future, they will shrink the encoder chip to fit
into a PC. This will greatly increase the market.
For example, it is useful for desktop publishing.
Mark said that Innovacom will help CUBE, not compete with it.
Innovacom has 19 engineers, 23 employees total.
They are focused on this goal.
Richard" |
