From yesterday's Electronic News. For a full text of the article, follow the link and click on "The Antenna."
sumnet.com
<<IBM, C-CUBE MPEG-2 ENCODING WAR RAGES--IBM Microelectronics is
unleashing a new family of MPEG-2 encoders this week and basking in the glow of technical
superiority for it. Though $60 MPEG-2 decoders are ubiquitous and multi-sourced, the more
difficult, start of the transmission and content creation encoding is fielding prices that range
between $1,500 and $2,500, according to IBM's Don Leake. IBM finds just one other horse in
this race: C-Cube Microsystems, and they both will head to the National Association of
Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas next week as the broadcasters get down to
business about who they will go to for digital TV broadcasting systems. These systems must
have an MPEG-2 encoder and 10 of them must be in place by next fall, as per the FCC. IBM
and C-Cube each say they don't release pricing because their competitor doesn't, but the matter
of price got a bit more interesting on the C-Cube side last week. C-Cube showed a
combination encoder and decoder last week, and said pricing on it would enable $300 PC
cards with the capability by the end of year. Both companies also are expecting Sony and LSI
Logic to get into the field soon. Stay tuned. >>
<<SNIP>>
<< MPEG-1 GETS A BOOST--With all the talk these days about MPEG-2 and the forthcoming
MPEG-4 standard, MPEG-1 sometimes is discarded by the wayside. However, as this week
will bear out, not all is lost in the MPEG-1 camp. Array Microsystems said that its VideoOne
Recorder MPEG1 video and audio capture card has been designed into the NetworkTV
system from Datafleet. The NetworkTV system, just out this week, supports both NTSC and
PAL standards and delivers video to desktop PCs over any local or wide area networks
(LANs or WANs). Utilizing Internet Protocol Multicast network the PCs can receive signal and
display live video without consuming excessive bandwidth, Array claims. The NetworkTV
system can be used with any PC running Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT. >> |
