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

To: Jeff Lins who wrote (49380)	5/18/2000 3:30:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

How long until C-Cube's premimum DVD MPEG-2 chips are a commodity? What then? A newer MPEG-4 chip? Will C-Cube still be the leader when these chips are in demand? CUBE has a stream of products in different markets -- MPEG-1 VCD decoder chips, MPEG-2 DVD decoder chips, consumer encoder chips for both MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, professional encoder chips for MPEG-2 and HDTV, and settop box chips. CUBE has always competed against big names such as SGS-Thomson, IBM, Philips, and Lucent as well as smaller names such as ESST. There are a LOT of BIG names that are interested in this area, with bigger R&D budgets...I am guessing that one stumble, and C-Cube is in big trouble... The larger players are not as nimble, and this is to their detriment. CUBE is not a one-product company. It is a one-technology company -- digital video. Again, honestly looking for info...I have been in a variety of semi co's in the past including video and sound...and they all turn to commodities sooner or later...what makes CUBED different? You are asking the right questions -- no need to apologize. Were you into video and sound in PCs? That is a much narrower market. Digital video is growing quickly and the explosive growth of broadband -- still at its early stages -- will further accelerate the growth in digital video. Go to CUBE's website and elsewhere and do some research on the company.

To: Jeff Lins who wrote (49380)	5/18/2000 4:56:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

C-Cube has been calling VCD a commodity business for years. About 1 and 1/2 years ago, at the end of a conference call, Alex Balkanski said that the VCD business is not a good place to be. He said that C-Cube was looking to other markets. Simple MPEG-2 decoder chips are a commodity today. The only way to differentiate from the Competition, is to offer high levels of integration, lowering the over all cost of a product. It's a constant race to stay ahead of the Competition. With consumer level codecs, the players are more limited. C-Cube has always had a lead, they need to keep it to be successful. If not, they will have to sell out to a bigger player. The biggest problem with investing in C-Cube is that the markets for recording digital video have not evolved yet. An investor is taking the risk that another company will have better products, and take the market away from C-Cube.