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To: HPilot who wrote (9079)	6/9/1999 11:30:00 PM
From: Ed Perry	Respond to of 17679

Will this do? From the NY Times June 9, 1999 Replay and Panasonic in Deal By SHARON R. KING Replay Networks, one of two makers of digital video recorders, has signed an agreement with the Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company to make its new systems, the companies announced Tuesday. Replay's rival, Tivo Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., already has a similar agreement for its Personal TV Receiver with Royal Philips Electronics N.V. The agreement helps expand Panasonic's reach in digital consumer electronics and broadens the distribution for Replay's product, called ReplayTV. Panasonic plans to offer the new set-top boxes in stores this fall in time for the Christmas season. Replay's recorders are already available from the company on the Internet and a toll-free telephone number. Tivo's recorder will be available in some consumer electronics stores in July. Both Replay and Tivo's set-top boxes take a step toward blending the power of computers with television. A receiver converts television signals from cable, satellite or antennas, digitizes the signal and saves it on a hard drive. No videotapes are needed. Customers can create custom "channels" supported by filtering software that automatically records all programs on specified subjects. The systems permit digital rewind, fast-forward and pause features for both recordings and live television. Such digital technology makes it possible, explained Jim Plant, marketing director for Replay, for a viewer who begins watching a program 10 minutes after it started, to rewind to the beginning of the show and view the entire program slowly or fast-forward to present time. In addition, both systems use a dial-up telephone connection that downloads television listing information. Currently, systems from Replay, based in Palo Alto, Calif., will store up to 28 hours of video. The hardware price ranges from $699 for 10 hours of viewing to $1,499 for 28 hours. The ReplayTV service, subsidized by advertising, offers a week's worth of television listings. For customers, any upgrades to the systems will automatically be downloaded at no charge, so buying new hardware will not be necessary, Plant said. For Panasonic, the Replay service adds another product to its digital lineup of televisions, camcorders, videodisk players and CD players. The company hopes that sales of such products will offset sagging sales of its more mature product lines like traditional VCR's, and analog television sets. "We see this as one of the key categories as we move forward," said Andrew P. Nelkin, general manager of Panasonic's consumer video division. In the future, Replay plans to add an interactive component to the system, allowing viewers to buy products, much as they can on the Internet. ************************************************************** I always had trouble spelling royalties and liscensing <g>. Also, see the following for what CBS is up to: cbs.marketwatch.com Finally, it looks like Disney will buy out Infoseek Ed Perry

To: HPilot who wrote (9079)	6/10/1999 1:22:00 AM
From: Carl R.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

No,no no. It's not that simple. I tried watching the feature "100 years of Horror" using both Real Player and Emblaze and there are clear differences. First of all, Real Player is truly streaming, and rarely buffered, but had a very poor picture. Emblaze is apparently quite adjustable in compression and at one extreme is close to streaming, and at the other extreme is like a Quick-Time Movie. The Emblaze movie can be re-run in whole or in part, which the Real version can do. My connection is 28.8. First I watched Emblaze at 28.8. It buffered a 10% head start, but the compression ratio wasn't high enough and it was playing the data 50% faster than that, so after 30% it stopped while it built up another lead, and so on. The resulting picture was pretty good, and had the curious characteristic that if the picture wasn't moving very much, the quality kept getting better and better. In playing the movie it buffered about 4 times, each for a substantial amount of time. Then I watched it on Real. It detected the speed of my connection and played at the appropriate speed. The picture quality was much lower, but the movie started faster, and only buffered a couple times, and then only for an instant. It was much closer to real time. Then I went back to Emblaze and selected 56k even though I am only at 28.8. Obviously there was much more buffering and it took a long time to load, but I did get to download the whole movie and watch it with a very high picture quality. So... if you need to play in real time, Real is the way to go, though MediaPlayer is probably also good. If you want a quality picture you could go with Quick-Time or Emblaze. But Emblaze is more than that. Emblaze obviously works at a lot of compression rates. Presumably you could increase the compression rate from the rate used at 28.8 and eliminate the buffering. Plus Emblaze doesn't require a special player. And Emblaze works especially well if the picture isn't moving too fast. Therefore Emblaze could be used to play a better quality movie if the user will tolerate the buffering. But Emblaze has another more obvious use. Go to the AENTV home page and you get banner ads which contain movies. I believe that these are Emblaze movies complete with sound! And these attract more attention (for now) and will have a higher click rate (at least for now) than still ads or even animated ads. And if the ads are designed well with a minimum of motion, the quality will be very good, though they do make the page slower to load. Carl