Videophone pioneer PictureTel Corp celebrated a piece in US editions of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal saying that picture telephones were at last beginning to take off by announcing a major five-year agreement with Intel Corp under which the two will jointly develop interactive digital video processing technology. The aim is to combine the Peabody, Massachusetts company’s digital video compression algorithm and Intel’s processor architecture technologies to create products that can deliver multimedia and videoconferencing to the desktop. These products will support proprietary video compression algorithms such as PictureTel’s HVQ and SG3, Intel’s Digital Video Interactive, and proposed international standards such as Px64 for videoconferencing and the proposed Motion Picture Expert Group algorithm for image storage and retrieval. The idea is that people should be able to use interactive multimedia applications in one personal computer window while conducting videoconferencing in another. The agreement is with Intel’s Princeton Operation in New Jersey, which is developing Digital Video Interactive technology with IBM. PictureTel claims that based on figures over the last 18 months, it is now the world’s leading video coder-decoder vendor.
