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

To: BillyG who wrote (34526)	7/20/1998 7:11:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

While the Government pondered, C-Cube enlisted the largest Chinese OEMs. C-Cube gave them a chip with better pictures, better sounds. If VCD's lifespan was to be extented, in the world of DVD, the time to ship was now. And so the OEMs started shipping the chip with better pictures, and better sounds.......................... techweb.com June 22, 1998, Issue: 1114 Section: News -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C-Cube to supply CVD Mark Hachman Silicon Valley- With the help of C-Cube Microsystems Inc., Chinese OEMs have created the successor to the VideoCD (VCD) player. The Chinese VideoCD (CVD) seemingly has emerged as the favored blend of cost and MPEG-2 encoding. However, C-Cube's competitors paint a more negative picture, claiming that a worldwide move to DVD will render the new CVD obsolete in a year's time. C-Cube co-designed the new specification, which will apparently replace another candidate to succeed the VCD, the Super VCD. To date, C-Cube is also the only publicly announced CVD supplier. The new CVD standard, which uses the same discs and loaders as the older VCD technology, transmits MPEG-2 data at a peak rate of 2.5 Mbits/s. Possible resolutions for NTSC and PAL displays comprise combinations of 480 or 570 horizontal pixels and 352 or 480 vertical pixels. Each disc is expected to store about 50 minutes of audio and video data. Chinese OEMs ChangHong, Idall, Malata, SAST, and Xiamen Solid will design players based on the CVD standard. "About a year ago, Chinese OEMs had the idea of looking at higher-quality video as a means of going beyond VCDs," said David Andaleon, director of strategic content development at C-Cube, Milpitas, Calif. The new players will incorporate C-Cube's CVDx chip, which will sell for approximately $18 to $20 and will ship in a 168-pin PQFP. The drives themselves are expected to cost roughly $150, about midway between the $100 cost of a VCD player and the $250 to $350 cost of a DVD player when it's first released, according to Andaleon. The CVD "is a very good idea in concept," acknowledged Alain Bismuth, director of DVD consumer products at LSI Logic Corp., Milpitas. "The point is that it's one year too late," with software and players not expected in volume before the first half of 1999-when DVD will have an entrenched foothold, he said. Furthermore, a Chinese-specific standard eliminates the possibility of export products, and that's frowned upon by the Chinese government, according to Bismuth. Copyright r 1998 CMP Media Inc.

To: BillyG who wrote (34526)	7/20/1998 7:40:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

DVD, "value rises exponentially with market share"................. scmp.com Tuesday July 21 1998 Personal Computing Dell helps DVD take another step towards the norm COX NEWS SERVICE in Atlanta If you are selling widgets, you just want to sell a bunch of them with a healthy profit margin. But if you are pushing a format, then just selling 10 times more units than last year may not be enough. You want it to be everywhere. As the premiere issue of Business 2.0 puts it, in discussing the emerging rules of the new economy, "value rises exponentially with market share" - at least for products that help establish a platform or a standard. "The more plentiful they become, the more essential each individual unit is, a striking exception to the economic rule that value comes from scarcity." Or to think of it from the other side, if only one person owns a fax machine, how much is it worth? In the case of DVD - the digital versatile disc - the format does not completely have to replace the compact disc, which was the first digital medium for pop culture, but it has to be in all the places that people go for entertainment. For DVD to become a roaring success, it must become the way people watch movies on television and on computers, at home, in airports and hotels. The challenge is like that faced by Apple Computer. The Macintosh computer might be, as founder Steve Jobs put it, "insanely great", but it cannot survive unless a potential purchaser knows there is plenty of Mac-friendly software and CD games on the shelves. Apple has the advantage of already having a large and loyal customer base, along with the disadvantage of competing against the marketing machines of Microsoft, Intel and IBM. Moreover, Mac competitors can argue that their format is as good or better. DVD starts from nothing. Even worse, most consumers already own CD players. But DVD has an inherent and critical advantage over CDs - they can hold much more than a CD. An entire movie can fit on a single DVD. Another disadvantage Macintosh has faced is in pricing - many buyers will not pay a premium just to own an Apple. DVD too has been more expensive. The manufacturers are trying to overcome all these obstacles. More and more movie titles are available on DVD. Most DVD players will be "backward compatible" - capable of playing the millions of CDs that consumers have already sunk money into. And the technology is becoming as mobile as we expect technology to be.