Petteri Pyyny
27 Oct 2004 15:46
According to DivX Networks' president, Shahi Gharman, the company which makes the video codec so often associated with online movie piracy, is about to sign deals with two major movie studios by the end of the year to offer their content in DivX-encoded format for on-demand online video service.
According to Gharman, movie studios are interested of the technology, which is already available in 20M non-PC devices worldwide, as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows Media platform.
DivX Networks, even though its reputation as a codec of choice for movie pirates (well, at least earlier on, before XviD and eventually DVDR took over), has actually worked on digital rights management system for quite some time now and it is obvious that studios are looking for DRM-locked solutions rather than non-restricted video formats to deliver their content for users.
Company also promised to deliver its upcoming version, DivX v6.0, by the end of this year, promising 33 percent better video compression rate than MPEG-4's most recent widely approved form, H.264. It is unclear how this affects on the fact that so far DivX 5.x series has been mostly MPEG-4 compliant and whether that will be the case in the future.
Source: News.com