Geo Interactive Media Signs Agreement with Lucent Technologies
Geo Interactive Media Group (www.emblaze.com), an Israeli company, reported that they have signed an agreement with Lucent Digital Video, a division of Lucent Technologies. Under the terms of this agreement Lucent Digital Video (LDV) will sell and market Emblaze products made by Orca Interactive, a subsidiary of Geo, to service providers.
Orca's Emblaze RightTv 2.0 software product allows service providers to offer Video On-Demand, and RightTv integrated with LDV's Wave Star Digital Video Encoding System allows for broadband broadcasting over IP , optical or ATM networks.
Geo designs streaming audio and video solutions for transmission over wireless and IP based networks. In addition to their current agreement with Lucent, Geo has been making tracks in the wireless space with its Emblaze technology. The unique trait of Emblaze's technology is that it is capable of streaming video over current generation wireless networks, but its functionality increases on a more advanced networks. Emblaze streams video on the MPEG-4 platform, and is able to use current network connections due to its client side algorithms. According to Sasson Darwish, President of Geo Interactive Media Group, a team of 15 PhD mathematicians have worked years to create Emblaze's software.
Industry analysts agree that the key to finding marketable uses for wireless streaming is incorporating all functionality into a single device. Most wireless streaming platforms currently require that a PDA is connected to the web using a internet-enabled cell phone.
Emblaze, however, has signed several agreements with Samsung over the past year. Samsung paid Geo a licensing fee of several million dollars with additional royalties on future sales for the right to market cell phones that are made with Emblaze's software and ASIC chips- the A2 and A3.
The A3 is functional on existing 2nd generation GSM and CDMA networks, but is compliant for 3G networks. Emblaze states that it can encode up to 30 frames/ second in real time and delivers high image quality due to its built-in motion estimation and post-filter de-blocking algorithms. Samsung showcased this technology at the Olympic games this year on a CDMA2000 1x network.
Reporters in Sydney were given the opportunity to glimpse the wireless future of video conferencing, MP3 downloads from the internet to the phone, and video clips of the Olympic action or movies available on demand. The Samsung CDMA2000 phone includes a small color LCD panel for displaying the video.