Sun & Philips are working together on a way to encode MPEG4 digital video by using special hardware. By sharing technology and a dual-marketing strategy they want to defeat the big guys in streaming media: RealNetworks and Windows Media.
The market they're aiming at is the broadband and wireless market.
The companies have partnered on marketing and have agreed to share technologies. In the most recent deal, Philips licensed Sun's StorEdge Media Central server technology. Philips said it will include the technology in a WebCine Server MPEG-4 system it is developing to run on Sun's Solaris Operating Environment and Sun Cobalt servers. |
Numerous network operators are making decisions now to enable open standards media capabilities like MPEG-4 streaming on new wireless deployments," Glidden said. "The key will be that network operators will enable services that profitably drive consumer adoption by balancing content quality and value with bandwidth.
Well streaming video on your PDA, GSM phone etc etc may sound nice, but to me still 1 questions rises: who needs this and will ever pay for this? Watching Planet of the apes on a 4x3cm screen ain't everything you ever wished for...
The good part I see in this is a legal way for encoding "DiVX" movies. Not that I got problems with the legal status of the DiVX encoder right now, but the ability to play these movies on your DVD player sounds awfully nice!
I know this feature isn't planned/implemented yet, but I really hope they will. It's a start however! Further on, time will tell!
Source: OsOpinion
