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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymund W who wrote (48287)	1/16/2000 9:11:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

iDVD players...................................... Samsung, Toshiba planning Net-connected DVD player By Jim Davis Staff Writer, CNET News.com January 12, 2000, 1:15 p.m. PT update The Internet may soon be riding into U.S. homes on the coattails of your DVD player. DVD players from the likes of Samsung and Toshiba will start to act more like a PC and should be hitting the market soon. Through the use of chip technology from a company called VM Labs, Samsung will offer a new $499 DVD player this quarter that will enable users to play games with graphics capabilities equal to that of current game console systems. Samsung said that later this year users will also be able to access the Internet. Toshiba has announced support for the technology but hasn't yet said when it will ship a product. With DVD players as one of the hot consumer electronics items of 1999 and probably of 2000 as well, companies offering Internet access devices such as America Online and WebTV as well as PC companies offering simplified Web browsing terminals may all be facing a formidable new competitor for consumers' dollars. DVD player sales rose 371 percent in 1999, and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) predicts another 6.5 million units will be sold this year. That amounts to about $1.5 billion worth of DVD players expected to be sold this year. By building in new interactive features, DVD players may attract a large number of consumers--and a large chunk of market share--who are looking for an easy way to get games and Internet access in their homes. If even only a small fraction of the total players sold interactive technology, consumer electronics companies could soon wind up with a subscriber base comparable to that of WebTV, which has been on the market since 1996. "These DVD players are aimed at people who typically wouldn't get a separate Internet set-top, game machine and DVD player," said Greg LaBrec, vice president of marketing for VM Labs. "There's a demand for interactive entertainment, but a lot of people don't have a PC" and don't necessarily want the action games typically available on devices such as the Sony PlayStation or Sega Dreamcast game console. VM Labs has designed a chip that basically combines a high-powered graphics chip with an MPEG chip that's used for playing back movies into one piece of inexpensive silicon. Instead of making money on the chip, VM Labs hopes to make money off royalties from software and DVD discs that use its technology. The company hopes this strategy will help the technology come into widespread use at a faster pace. VM Labs isn't the only company developing technology for these souped-up DVD players. National Semiconductor's Mediamatics subsidiary and C-Cube Microsystems will both be producing chips for interactive DVD players and are working in alliance with PlanetWeb to enable services such as Web browsing, online banking and the like. more................................... news.cnet.com