And ANOTHER!
Lucent Technologies and Blue Spike Announce Alliance for Digital Music
Security
MIDDLETOWN, N.J./MIAMI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 24, 2000--Lucent
Technologies (NYSE: LU) and Blue Spike, Inc., a leading developer of
secure digital watermarking applications that enable copyrights to be
embedded into audio or video content, today announced an alliance that
will incorporate the Lucent Enhanced Perceptual Audio Coder(TM)
(ePAC(TM)), the industry's leading audio coder, into Blue Spike's
leading-edge music security solution.
The ePAC coder will be integrated into Blue Spike's "end-to-end"
solution for music security, which enables producers to offer
piracy-proof music products with the highest audio quality for both
electronic delivery and packaged media. Music packages embedded with
the Blue Spike digital watermarking solution can now gain CD-quality
sound with ePAC while maintaining the integrity of the original source
material, even when mixed with enhanced text, images, and video. The
scaleable system can be used on a wide range of products, including
portable music players, personal computers and high-end stereo
equipment.
"The Blue Spike end-to-end solution, combined with ePAC, is an ideal
product for the secure digital music industry, enabling greater degrees
of copyright protection across the industry," said Joyce Eastman,
director of audio initiatives for Lucent Technologies. "The elegance of
Blue Spike's product, with its `trusted transactions' technology, helps
assure producers that they can encode with ePAC and deliver their
content, fully protected, across a range of digital media platforms."
Both Lucent Technologies and Blue Spike are members of the Secure
Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), the worldwide recording industry's
effort to develop an open, secure access system for digital music.
"Lucent provides us with an exceptional audio compression package that
allows us to demonstrate a complete solution for music copyright
owners," said Scott Moskowitz, president of Blue Spike. "We believe
that this is the answer to the music industry's digital copyright
problem."
Blue Spike and Lucent are natural partners to offer a secure
state-of-the-art electronic music distribution system. Lucent is a
pioneer in high quality audio compression and Blue Spike is a pioneer
in digital watermarking. When combined with security technologies, the
the combination of Lucent's ePAC and Blue Spike's watermarking will
provide an ideal solution for Internet delivery of music, ensuring high
quality and a pleasurable experience for consumers while protecting the
rights of copyright owners.
Lucent's ePAC coder is interoperable with RealNetworks' G2 Player and
has been licensed to e.Digital for its handheld Internet music device
and to Lydstrom, Inc. for its Songbank home Internet stereo device. The
ePAC coder will also be integrated into VedaLabs' music software and
hardware platforms.
ePAC is based on the Lucent Perceptual Audio Coder(TM) (PAC(TM)), the
highest-quality digital audio codec in the industry.
ePAC is a new version of the Lucent Perceptual Audio Coder(TM)
(PAC(TM)) developed by Bell Labs, the research and development arm of
Lucent Technologies. PAC is an audio compression algorithm with the
highest-quality audio at the lowest bit rates. At 128 kilobits per
second, ePAC offers CD-transparent stereo sound.
ePAC uses psychoacoustic modeling - that is, a representation of how
humans hear sound - to compress music in a way that is not noticeable
to the ear. Music is compressed at a rate of 11 to 1, thus reducing the
transmission time/bandwidth and storage by the same ratio, while still
retaining its fidelity.
Several recent improvements in ePAC have pushed its performance levels
to new heights, including: ePAC's improved quantization and coding,
allowing higher quality audio at lower bit rates, and ePAC's improved
psychoacoustic modeling from Bell Labs research, which provides
CD-transparent sound at 128 kbps.
ePAC's variable bit rates and superior audio quality allow the coder to
be used in multiple bandwidth applications.
Lucent Technologies' famed research and development arm, Bell Labs, has
been at the forefront of technology for the music industry for decades,
with the introduction of sound for motion pictures in 1926; the
invention of stereo recording in 1933; the invention of the transistor
in 1947; the introduction of computer-synthesized music in the 1950s;
the introduction of psychoacoustics in the 1960s; sub-band coding of
audio in the 1970s; the introduction of linear predictive coding in the
1980s, and the Perceptual Audio Coder in the 1990s.
Blue Spike is the leading provider of secure digital watermarking and
content protection technologies based on an extensive patent portfolio.
Blue Spike's technology enables owners of multimedia content such as
music labels, movie studios, banking and financial institutions and
government agencies to establish ownership over digital copies, and to
identify legitimacy of digital information that otherwise would appear
to be exact, perfect copies. Blue Spike's digital watermarking
application is the only provably secure watermarking system that makes
use of cryptographic keys, which are used to authenticate the digital
asset. Blue Spike's "trusted transactions" represent a new era for
bridging cryptographic security with human trust. Trusted transactions
are a leading contender for democratizing security for all
transactions. For more information on Blue Spike's technology visit the
company's web site at www.bluespike.com/
Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., designs,
builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks,
communications systems and software, data networking systems, business
telephone systems and microelectronic components. Bell Labs is the
research and development arm for the company. For more information on
Lucent Technologies, visit the company's web site at www.lucent.com.
CONTACT:
Lucent Technologies
Chris Pfaff
908/582-7571 (office)
800/705-2368 (pager)
cpfaff@lucent.com
Wendy Zajack
908/582-4824 (office)
wzajack@lucent.com
or
Blue Spike, Inc.
Gregg Moskowitz
212/725-3974 (office)
gregg@bluespike.com
KEYWORD: NEW JERSEY FLORIDA |
