Tiny MPEG specialist Innovacom Inc today announced a development tie up with Litton Industries’ Fibercom Inc subsidiary to endow its CAMVision-2 network video delivery system with MPEG2 power. Previous editions of the system were based on Motion JPEG, allowing at best 20:1 compression ratios when used on video. Existing Innovacom MPEG2 ratios offer closer to 100:1 compression, and Fibercom will sell the system into video conferencing and distance learning applications running across Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks. MPEG2 over ATM will be shown by the pair next week at the National Association of Broadcasters convention next week in Las Vegas. This deal follows close on the heels of an announcement earlier in March that Innovacom will help Digital Equipment with its MPEG2 strategy, although further inspection showed this to be shrouded in mystery, with no announcement from DEC’s end yet and Mark Koz, CEO and President of Innovacom only able to confirm that Innovacom enjoyed a technology exchange agreement with DEC in MPEG video chips. Reading between the lines, Koz’s 36 man team seems to be taking its MPEG2 know how to DEC, partly gleaned from Koz’s own research in the area and partly from his direct membership of the Motion Pictures Experts Group. Koz’s team has also recently completed some microcode collaboration with MPEG leaders C-Cube, and now hopes to grow big enough to compete head to head with C-Cube. A chip builder of DEC’s renown would offer plenty of help here. Innovacom is living off $3 million raised when it went public over the counter late last year on a promise to deliver MPEG2 on a single chip, where most suppliers aren’t yet able to do this. However the deal with Fibercom is currently based around shipment of a development system and a board level product, with engineering samples of single chip MPEG2 components shipment in handfuls only. Mark Koz added: We have been shipping development systems to a lot of Telcos, for the development of video telephony, but I can’t give any names yet.
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