Anystream and PacketVideo Partner

Anystream (www.anystream.com) and PacketVideo Corporation ( www.packetvideo.com) announced on Tuesday a technology alliance to incorporate PacketVideo's MPEG-4 compliant codec into Anystream's Agility encoding product family.

"Anystream's goal is to place no limits on the number and variety, of versions that content creators can produce via our massively scalable streaming media encoding platform," said Geoff Allen, president and CEO of Anystream. "PacketVideo's encoding technology is particularly attractive because it is based on the MPEG-4 standard, which was designed to enable content companies to encode once - over multiple bit rates - and distribute everywhere over many mediums, including cable, satellite and PacketVideo's specialty, wireless," Allen said.

Anystream says that the adoption of streaming media over forthcoming 2.5G and 3G networks is inevitable, and wants to be poised to support MPEG-4. Once wireless streaming becomes a reality, the agreement has the potential to facilitate the automated encoding of the additional format for some of Anystream's clients such as CNN Interactive, Digital Island, and NFL Films.

PacketVideo has designed an end-to-end solution for the wireless distribution of multimedia, but has just announced trials with carriers rolling out next generation networks.

The encoding software that incorporates the PV codec should be commercially available in the first half of 2001.