Startup Eyes Skies for High-End HD On-Demand
XstreamHD Claims Its Can Deliver Better-Quality High-Definition Movies Than Cable, DBS or Telcos
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 11/15/2007 9:02:00 AM
Another fighter is stepping over the ropes into the high-definition fracas: Startup XstreamHD says it has developed technology to deliver high-definition movies on-demand -- over satellite links -- that are of better quality than HDTV services from any cable, direct-broadcast satellite or telephone operator.
The idea wouldn’t lift off until the second half of next year, at the earliest. XstreamHD president and founder George Gonzalez said the McLean, Va.-based company is not ready to disclose its service-provider partner, which he claimed will launch a consumer offering in the third quarter of 2008. Nor would he say which studios will be offering HD movies through the service.
But Gonzalez promised that the company’s setup can deliver video with stunning quality of up to 1080p, the highest-resolution HD standard on the market, which delivers video at 60 frames per second on a 1920-by-1080-pixel screen.
“What XstreamHD is about is changing the distribution paradigm,” he said. “Today the entertainment distribution market -- cable, satellite, Internet-based distributors -- are all trying to massage the content into a format for the stream rates they have available.”
The startup proposes to deliver HD movies as large files over standard geosynchronous satellites to a media gateway in the home, using a proprietary adaptive modulation scheme. The gateway device also will provide a tuner and antenna capable of receiving local HD broadcast TV signals, and incorporate multiroom digital video recording features.
The XstreamHD service, as imagined, would lack any cable network channels. Gonzalez maintained that providing the best HD available would be the service’s overriding value proposition. “Distributors today focus on the number of [HD] channels they carry,” he said. “What we focused on was designing a new system not based on legacy network infrastructure to deliver the highest-quality high-definition content.”
By using geosynchronous satellites instead of direct-broadcast satellites, XstreamHD can use high-speed satellite data transmission without being regulated by the Federal Communications Commission as a video-programming distributor, according to Gonzalez.
Encoding rates will vary, but an average movie title would be delivered as a roughly 14 to 16 gigabyte file. “If you tried to send that over the Internet it would come to a crawl,” Gonzalez said. The home gateway will support playback of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats, and use the U.S. government’s Advanced Encryption Standard to scramble content.
XstreamHD’s secret sauce, Gonzalez said, is its proprietary protocol for streaming data over satellites. “If you’re moving a 15-gigabyte file, you’re going to lose a lot of packets. Our technology corrects those packets so that when the user goes to view the content there are no impairments in the content -- they have a copy of the studio master in their home.”
Before starting XstreamHD, Gonzalez was chief technology officer and president of iDirect Technologies, which developed a bidirectional satellite broadband router and was acquired in 2005 by Singapore Technologies Engineering for $165 million in cash.
As for pricing, Gonzalez wouldn’t give specifics but said the XstreamHD service is going to be “far below” the price of a cable or satellite subscription, closer to the cost of a monthly DVD rental service.
The 26-employee startup, founded in 2002, is backed by private investors with no venture capital funding. Gonzalez declined to disclose the amount invested in the venture to date.
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