Philips Announces Live Broadband Broadcasting Over The Internet
The exploding growth of bandwidth on the Internet will soon make it possible to broadcast compelling, value-for-money content over the Internet. At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention last week, Philips Digital Video Systems demonstrated a complete portfolio of solutionsófrom real-time encoding to Internet set-top boxes, making the Internet a true mass medium by bringing live broadcasting into the living room. Philips Digital Video Systems recognized at an early stage in its development the opportunities the Internet presents for the broadcasting industry. In 1998, a new business activity was started at Philips to pursue the opportunities of Internet Broadcasting. ""Nettec,"" as the group is called, is already in a position to demonstrate very impressive results, which were shown at NAB. - Live broadcasting over the Internet. Philips real-time MPEG-4 encoders designed to produce content with the highest video quality live to the Web. - Broadcasting over the Internet to the living room environment. True multiastnig at 400 kilobits per second and 800 kilobits per second (streamed, for example, over calbe or ADSL) gives users video quality viewing worth paying for. - Secure protectin for compelling service content. Philips showed content protection technology suitable for multicasting over the Web. ""With our competencies in this technology and our long experience in the broadcasting industry,"" says Gerrit Niemeijer, Manager of Nettec, ""Philips Digital Video System is the perfect partner for organizations that have the ambition to become an Internet broadcaster."" MPEG-4 will play an important role in Internet broadcasting. This new standard in audio and video compression and encoding, which has been defined in cooperation with leading software suppliers like Microsoft, has significant advantages over previous encoding protocols. It enable streaming video via the Internet independent of the offered medium (satellite, ISDN, etc.). Itís also an ""object-based"" encoding technique, which allows images to be customized to an unprecedented degree. Philips is expanding its conditional access (CA) offering to the requirements of the Internet such as flexible-payment schemes. Mr. Niemeijer added, ""Nettec will be able to support broadcasters at every level. As front runners in end-to-end digital broadcasting, we already have the entire range of technology expertise in house. And as Philips is also an innovator in areas like set-top boxes and Web-TV, we can offer levels of support few other partners can match.""