NEW YORK-Emblaze Systems Inc. will optimize its patented streaming media technology for use in wireless devices running on Symbian’s EPOC operating system, under an agreement announced last week.
A simulation using content from Emblaze’s content partners and Symbian-based smart phones will be available on Symbian’s Web site at www.symbian.com in the near future, the companies said.
Emblaze Systems, known until last month as Geo Interactive Media Group Ltd., already has in place an agreement with Nokia Corp. to develop a streaming MPEG-4 video player and telco-grade video server and gateway for the new Nokia 9210 Communicator. This clamshell phone, based on Symbian’s EPOC, has a color screen and works in dual mode, both GSM and GPRS. It is scheduled for commercial release by summer.
“CDPD, CDMA, GPRS, GSM-it’s not a problem for us to support all these different air interfaces. Our technology has dynamic scalability and adjusts itself to different generations of wireless,” said Ziv Eliraz, the New York-based vice president of business development for Emblaze, an Israeli company.
“For error concealment, we use 33 different algorithms for motion estimation, similar to predictive text entry. We can compensate for short drops in calls.”
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has incorporated the patented Emblaze A2 video ASIC chip into its new SPH-X2000 phones, which the handset maker demonstrated last month at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association show in Las Vegas. Eliraz said the new phones would be marketed commercially first in South Korea for use on a 2.5-generation wireless network. However, he said he is not at liberty to identify the carrier there that will sell the phones or provide an estimated time for their commercial debut.
Emblaze Systems also recently announced a collaboration to integrate its streaming audio and video capabilities into the Microsoft Corp. Windows Media Technologies. The goal is to allow all future cellular phones or other wireless devices using Emblaze technology to access Microsoft Windows Media content.
“Among other things, we are a fab-less semiconductor maker through our Emblaze Research subsidiary, because we think the ability to produce these chips is very important,” Eliraz said.
“We also make streaming servers that make the conversion from the chip through the air interface and onto the carrier’s infrastructure. These can sit at the carrier’s facility or the content provider’s. But the closer to the carrier the servers are, the more optimized they are for wireless networks because (proximity) allows us to sense changes in bandwidth much better and quicker.”
Ericsson Inc. now bundles Emblaze Systems servers into the GPRS systems it builds for wireless carriers.
“Another part of our back-end solution is application servers for multimedia messaging. These reside either at the telco or anywhere else you can host it,” Eliraz said.
In a shared-revenue partnership with Energis, a United Kingdom carrier similar in strategy to Qwest Communications, Emblaze is setting up telecom hotels for multimedia servers.
Emblaze also develops content management servers because “carriers are not going to encode content or update it with HTML,” Eliraz said.
“This is a layer that sits between the carrier and the content provider. It works seamlessly and instantaneously so you don’t have the kind of problem (of screen formatting) that there is today with DVD players.”
Emblaze, which is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, has “$400 million in the bank and a market capitalization of just under $1 billion,” Eliraz said.
