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To: BillyG who wrote (48165)	1/7/2000 1:20:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

OPTIBASE HITS THE HEIGHTS IN STREAMING VIDEO 12/06/1999 Inside Multimedia (c) 1999 Phillips Business Information, Inc. Israeli company Optibase has doubled its share price in the past month as a result of its recent deal with Cisco. Although Optibase is associated in many minds with DVD authoring systems, in reality this small company is a world leader in MPEG digital video compression and decompression systems. Starting in 1990 with only four people, Optibase now employs more than 80 dedicated people at its offices in Israel, the United States and the UK. Optibase's digital video solutions are marketed in over 40 countries worldwide through a channel of over 100 distributors, dealers and resellers. DVD is but a small albeit important part of its portfolio. We spoke to Adrian Exton, who heads up Optibase Europe from offices in Chippenham. On the recent startling rise in the share price he said: "The long-awaited IPO took place in April and we raised a few million. We told them of the Cisco deal at the time and nobody noticed. The shares continued to flop around at $6. Suddenly they have soared on the back of an analyst's report". The Cisco deal is an OEM agreement in which Optibase will supply its MPEG MovieMaker 200 MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 encoding boards for Cisco's IP/TV solution. IP/TV is a complete network video solution that combines a family of high performance servers with client-server software. It transmits live and pre-recorded video to desktop PCs over IP networks. Integrating Optibase's digital video products with Cisco's IP/TV 3400 Broadcast Servers allows efficient streaming of high quality video over networks while conserving bandwidth. See www.cisco.com. MPEG MovieMaker 200 is a single-board real-time MPEG encoder that supports the entire spectrum of video and audio encoding, from MPEG-1 through high-end MPEG-2 encoding. It is ideal for applications requiring transmission of high quality video at low to medium bandwidths, such as streaming video over Intranets, video networking and medical imaging. IM analysis The shares of Optibase were languishing at $6 (Pounds 3.75) until the Cisco announcement. Suddenly they doubled to around $12, valuing the company at around a staggering $100 million. Obviously the market suddenly decided that they were an Internet stock and reacted accordingly. Surely a lesson to us all. Optibase has another trick up its sleeve - its MediaLink black box which has four bays each housing an MPEG encoder for different resolutions. Yet another company to watch. See www.optibase.com. Adrian Exton will be speaking about DVD and streaming video at DVD Summit III next April. See www.dvdsummit.com.

To: BillyG who wrote (48165)	1/7/2000 3:05:00 PM
From: David E. Railsback	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Billy, which model did you purchase? As an aside, I intended to purchase a Samsung model 709 for both my son and daughter for Christmas when Best Buy had them on sale in Columbus, Ohio for $199.95. The ad was in the "stuffer" on the Sunday paper, but it was Thursday before I got to Best Buy. Needless to say they had none. However, instead of telling me they were sold out the sales person told me that they (Best Buy in Columbus (Morse Road store) had found it necessary to send all of their inventory of the Samsung Model 709 back because it was unable to decode some of the more recent movie releases. I challenged him and specifically inquired as to whether or not the problem was with the movie "Matrix" (which has been reported to have production or authoring problems) and he indicated that he did not know which recent releases had been a problem for the Samsung machine. I regularly shop at this particular Best Buy and had never seen this sales person before and I'm betting he did not know what he was talking about. Any insight? Would appreciate the benefit of the Board's knowledge on this subject. Regards, Dave R.