C - Cube Delivers Digital Video First Bridges Gap Between Acquisition and Distribution
09/07/98
Multimedia Week
(c) 1998 Phillips Business Information, Inc.
C - Cube Microsystems Inc. [CUBE] has completed work on technology necessary to transcode digital video into MPEG-2. The chip designer will announce two codecs based on the development at the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) in Amsterdam this week.
An industry first, the DVxpress-MX also enables content creators to mix DV streams when used in conjunction with a PC.
DV camcorder and equipment supplier Panasonic Broadcast and Digital Systems Co. [MC] is expected to announce support for the codec at the Amsterdam trade show.
Joe Sutherland, C - Cube product marketing manager, said his company has worked closely with Panasonic on the engineering side, exchanging information about DV bit stream formats and the specifics of the DVC Pro line. Panasonic plans to purchase the codec from a board maker buying the codec from Milpitas, Calif.-based C - Cube , Sutherland said.
Panasonic officials were not available for comment to confirm the deal, but co-marketing plans in the works for IBC suggest strong ties between the companies. Didier LeGall, C - Cube 's CTO, will provide details about the new architecture at an IBC Panasonic press conference, and the company will be listed in a partner brochure Panasonic is distributing about companies that support DVC Pro.
Customers On Board
In terms of OEM sales, Sutherland said at least four companies have ordered sample chips.
He expects products leveraging the C - Cube codec to ship in the first half of '99 and show up in full force at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual conference in April.
C - Cube 's goal is to get the DVxpress-MX chips into as many non- linear video-editing systems as possible.
This month, the company started sampling a 25 Mbps version (DVxpress-MX25) for the prosumer market and a 50Mbps version (DVxpress-MX50) for the professional market. The chips will be available for $175 each in quantities of 20,000 and $400 in quantities of 10,000, respectively. Sutherland expects the prosumer chip to show up in PC and video-editing cards priced from $900 to $2,000, with the MX50 chip slated for the $5,000-plus market.
Roughly 250,000 non-linear editing systems sell annually. If C - Cube can earn design wins in 10 percent of those systems, at an average price of $300 each, the company will bring in $7.5 million. And if digital camcorder prices become consumer friendly and rewritable DVD (an MPEG-2 format) becomes a standard for archiving, the company's total available market will become even higher.
C - Cube first announced work on a transcoder in April 1997 with Adaptec Inc. [ADPT] to put the codec on the a board along with 1394 silicon. The companies stopped their co-development when Adaptec scaled back 1394 efforts earlier this year. ( C - Cube , 408/ 944-6300)
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