LONDON-MmO2 has inked an agreement with audio compression specialists Coding Technologies under which the operator will use MPEG-4 aacPlus as the audio compression standard for the O2 Music service launched this week.
The O2 Music service provides an “over the air” music download service that allows subscribers to select, retrieve, store and play back music tracks from a comprehensive list via their mobile handsets onto the pocket-sized O2 Digital Music Player (O2 DMP) supplied by Siemens AG. The player is connected to a mobile handset via a short cable or infrared link and features a 64 Megabyte SD memory card.
MPEG-4 aacPlus, which combines MPEG AAC and Coding Technologies’ own Spectral Band Replication (SBR) technology, saves cost and bandwidth across the service chain, condensing audio file sizes while delivering the same audio quality of a file twice the size. Operators benefit from new revenue and reduced cost of deployment, while subscribers are able to download music quickly and cheaply, Coding Technologies said.
The agreement with MmO2 follows a recent announcement from South Korea’s SK Telecom that it will use the standard in its forthcoming third-generation service content offerings.
“For the new mobile music services, consumers want it fast, cheap and easy. aacPlus helps O2 meet that demand with the world’s most efficient audio compression made available in mission-critical encoders and decoders,” said Stefan Meltzer, vice president of business development for Coding Technologies, commenting on the deal.
