First, you have to understand what C-cube's business is. Decoders for set-top
boxes, decoders for the VCD players in Asia, and total ownership of the encoding
market for broadcast. (even IBM hasn't created a solution with their chip set to
meet the broadcasters specs. Now I suppose they will, but at that time, C-Cube will
release their single chip, Microsparc based mpeg 2 encoder.)
Encoding is moving toward the PC and the MMX Intel chip still is very short in cycles to
do encoding. (an example is that MPEG 1encoding would need a pentium 900 to do real time
encoding. ) decoding, or playback can be done by the mmx chip. ( who cares, this is only less that 5% of C-cube's businness
and focus. Now decoding on a notebook requires the c-cube chip for
the notebooks power limitations. (Battery life) Sure, use your mmx for
a movie playback, but your battery is dead in an hour. Use a decoder on
the newly available PCMCIA card, (that totaly unburdens the CPU and uses less than 1 watt) and
your battery life is 3 hours. C-cube has locked up Toshiba in this space and others are on the way!!
DVD is comming, and no one is better positioned for dvd than C-Cube.
Their solution is a A/V solution and will support all of the features that are
needed in the DVD space (ie encription, multiple camera angles, language
tracks, etc)
VCD is still exploding in Asia. C-cube has a powerfull branding effort going (C-Cube inside)
C-Cube has entered and enabled the Indian market and still owns 90%+
of the world vcd market. Sure their is comp, but their is enough business for
everyone. (Ess tech just anounced a sony win. Ess stock rises, C-cube
goes down. go figure, Sony has 12 vcd players, c-cube is on 10 of them!!
food for thought!
Kibby |
