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

To: Ian deSouza who wrote (32874)	5/1/1998 10:23:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Minerva, C-Cube customer. Their staff.................... minervasys.com Minerva's Executive Team Mauro Bonomi is Minerva's President and Chief Executive Officer. Prior to founding Minerva in December of 1992, Mauro was Director of Marketing and a member of the executive staff of C-Cube Microsystems which he joined shortly after its incorporation. During his tenure at C-Cube, from 1989 through 1992, Mr. Bonomi contributed heavily to the establishment of the JPEG and MPEG compression standards. Before joining C-Cube, Mr. Bonomi held various marketing management positions with Weitek Corporation. Mauro holds two masters degrees from Stanford University, one in electrical engineering and another in management, and holds an undergraduate degree with honors in engineering from Pavia University in Italy... ...Jean-Georges Fritsch is Vice President of Engineering for Minerva. Mr. Fritsch joined Minerva Systems in 1994 as Director of Research and Development. Previously at C-Cube Microsystems, he was the Managing Director and Technical Lead for C-Cube's MPEG decoder products. He also contributed to C-Cube's encoding algorithm development. From 1987 to 1989, he was a staff scientist at Alcatel Business Systems, focusing on speech recognition, speech compression and digital acoustic echo canceling algorithms and VLSI implementations. Jean-Georges holds a Ph.D. in computer science and signal processing from the University of Nancy in France.

To: Ian deSouza who wrote (32874)	5/2/1998 3:31:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

These settops use C-Cube chips.............................. dailynews.yahoo.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thursday April 30 3:22 PM EDT Kirch Offers Film Rights To Save Bertelsmann Deal By Amelia Torres BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - German media mogul Leo Kirch has offered to sell 25 percent of his output rights to Hollywood films and to license production of digital decoders in order to win European Commission approval for his television alliance with Bertelsmann AG. The proposals were detailed in a letter to the commission on Tuesday, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters on Thursday. But they are unlikely to satisfy anybody. The German Federal Cartel Office said Wednesday the concessions were insufficient, and German cable TV operators and rival broadcasters were expected to voice further concerns. Kirch owns Europe's biggest film library and has output deals with Hollywood majors Warner Bros., Walt Disney Co., Columbia Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox, giving it the right to buy most films produced in future. A source close to the talks said the 25 percent of rights to films not yet produced were insufficient to enable a company to start a film channel, and there was no mention of sports rights, which Kirch also has in abundance. The proposal to license the production of decoder boxes also met with skepticism, as it was unclear how disputes over licensing terms would be settled despite suggestions for an arbitration body. "We don't think the conditions go far enough and are too vague. The devil is in the detail," the source said. Interested parties had until Thursday night to file their comments with the commission, the source said. The commission, the executive body of the European Union, declined to comment on the proposals. It will consult with a committee of merger experts from the 15 EU states on May 6 before taking a final decision, possibly on May 20 or May 27. Dieter Wolf, president of the German cartel authority, told reporters the proposals did not relieve concerns about a digital TV monopoly in Germany. After years of bitter rivalry, Kirch and Bertelsmann announced last summer they were pooling efforts to get digital TV off the ground with the cooperation of former telecommunications monopoly Deutsche Telekom. The deal involves Kirch and CLT-UFA, the TV joint venture between Bertelsmann and Audiofina, to merge pay-TV company Premiere with Kirch's ailing digital TV channel DF1 and to use decoder technology developed by Kirch's BetaResearch. The cornering by powerful pay-TV companies such as Kirch and Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB in Britain of the rights to some popular sports programming also has sparked a heated debate over whether such events should automatically be shown on free television. The German authorities are drawing up a list of sports events that must be available to all viewers. But the list is considered deficient by some, as it features mainly big events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup Soccer finals, which take place only every four years. Reuters/Variety