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To: Pallisard who wrote (3552)	7/31/1998 5:06:00 PM
From: Javelyn Bjoli	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27311

A product with polymer batteries announced... __________________________________________ July 27, 1998 Low bit-rate technology from NTT could be candidate for MPEG-4 Net audio player spins new compression scheme Yoshiko Hara Tokyo - Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) and Kobe Steel Ltd. have jointly proposed a way to distribute and secure audio over the Internet using a newly developed player the size of a credit card. The compression technology the audio player uses-called TwinVQ-was developed by NTT and is considered a candidate for MPEG-4 audio. The two companies have tentatively named the player Solid-Audio and are inviting partners in Japan and overseas to establish the delivery system from which the player will download content. The aim is to build an infrastructure with secure copyright protection. "More and more audio contents are distributed through the Internet," said Kazuhiko Sato, general manager of the multimedia business department at NTT. "We want to establish a platform on which the distribution of contents can be controlled with a fair charge." Content-whether music, educational material, news or some other type of audio-will be guarded by NTT's proprietary digital-watermarking technology and other copy-protection measures. The player gets audio data in TwinVQ compression via dedicated downloaders and plays it back directly. To further boost security, the two companies are considering a proprietary interface that would ensure the data is transferred only between the content provider's server and the player, with no duplicates created. The partners intend to bring their idea to copyright-holding organizations. "Just the idea and the player won't make a business," said Shinji Ono, senior vice president of NTT's multimedia business department. "We are going to invite an all-inclusive list of partners," including content providers, equipment OEMs and distributors and downloader manufacturers. The companies aim to deliver products in the middle of next year. By 2001, they hope for a penetration of about 1 million units, or about $220 million. The player weighs an ounce and a half. With a 16-Mbyte flash memory, it plays CD-quality sound (44.1-kHz sampling) for 25 minutes and FM-radio quality (22-kHz sampling) for 50 minutes. It runs off a lithium-ion polymer battery just 0.05-inch thick that fits at the back of the player. Developed by Yuasa Corp., it has a capacity of 175 mAh at 3.6 V. The battery powers the player for about three hours. Developed by the NTT Human Interface Laboratories, TwinVQ (for "transform-domain weighted interleave vector quantization") compression was proposed for the audio specification of MPEG-4 and virtually adopted, according to an NTT spokesman. NTT has been offering a software TwinVQ encoder and decoder over the Internet since July 1995, and the number of downloads overseas now equals those in Japan, the spokesman said. Some content providers are offering music in TwinVQ compression over the Internet. NTT said TwinVQ offers a higher compression ratio (from 1:18 to 1:96) than the scaler quantization of conventional audio coders. Compression can scale from a bit rate as low as 8 kbits/second/channel with 8-kHz sampling to a high of 48 kbits/s channel at 44.1-kHz sampling. The Electronics Information Technology Laboratory at Kobe Steel implemented TwinVQ's decoding function as a one-chip DSP device and developed the player in cooperation with NTT. Kobe Steel intends to promote SolidAudio as its new business. The prototype player was configured with a Texas Instruments DSP and Toshiba's SmartCard flash memory. Volume products will substitute less-expensive devices, said Yoshihiro Nishomoto, manager of the Kobe Steel laboratory. Copyright r 1998 CMP Media Inc.