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

To: JPM who wrote (29750)	2/20/1998 3:11:00 PM
From: Rarebird	Respond to of 50808

I think you need to find a good broker and a better stock to invest in!

To: JPM who wrote (29750)	2/20/1998 3:26:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Intel's new encryption seems to address video after it is converted to analog. And it will pass between appliances over firewire........... C-Cube and Adaptec are working on a transceiver.................. c-cube.com www5.zdnet.com Starting a fire under digital home appliances By Robert Lemos, ZDNN February 20, 1998 5:39 AM PST Real cool digital devices for the home are already starting to appear: digital video disc (DVD) players, interactive TV set-top boxes, and digital TVs. Only problem: There is no way to connect them. Until now. On Thursday, Intel Corp. (INTC) and four major consumer electronics companies introduced a framework for connecting VCRs, digital TVs, DVD players, and computers together securely. Until the announcement, no well-supported recipe existed for sending data -- such as DVD movies and Internet content -- between home appliances. The high-speed, secure cable technology -- called "Firewire" -- is a green light for movie makers to shift more of their content to DVD. "Content providers will not release movies or audio without protection," said Mark Kirstein, industry analyst at market researcher In-Stat. "Firewire is critical in ensuring that content has some protection while being sent between devices." The movie producers agreed. "Developing the ability to protect digital content in transit is a very important step in delivering [DVD] to the consumer," said Chris Cookson, executive vice president of Warner Brothers, in a statement. The secure twist to a relatively old technology helps movie makers sidestep the specter of piracy. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, U.S. movie makers lose about $250 million a year to the copying of video cassettes. In 1996 (the most recent year for which numbers are available), almost 580,000 pirate videos were seized in raids throughout the U.S., including 100,000 from a pirate operation in New York City. Granted, that's perhaps only a mere fraction of the 640 million VHS cassettes sold last year, but the advent of DVD could mean far greater losses. The digital nature of such content means that a perfect master can be made and copies produced much faster than VHS video tapes. For movie houses, this is a recipe for disaster. Intel's new framework using Firewire is intended to plug the potentially major security hole in digital home appliances. By scrambling data before sending it to other appliances, content creators believe that pirates won't be able to copy a clean version of the content. "[The connection] is one of the weak links," said Jae Kim, an analyst with film and video market watcher Paul Kagan Associates. "The thought has copyright holders quaking in their boots." For this reason, today's DVD players only output analog signals scrambled with a protection scheme from Macrovision. The current market for such a framework is still in its infancy. The heart of the Firewire market today is digital camcorders, which only accounted for 1 million in sales in 1997, according to In-Stat. That number will jump much higher, though. The company estimates that by the end of 1999, sale of devices using Firewire will hit 25 million units. Why such amazing growth? Soon everything will be connected by the secure Firewire cables. "This is going to be in every digital box," said In-Stat's Kirstein. "What will develop could be called the digital entertainment center network." Such as network could connect satellite receivers with digital TVs, and both of those with an Internet TV box. In the end, companies could cut costs by putting key hardware -- such as the chips for decompressing movies -- in a single box that all the components could use over the digital entertainment center network. "This will break the bottleneck at home," said In-Stat's Kirstein.