Destiny Media Announces Mobile Patent Application
Destiny Media Technologies Inc. is pleased to announce that a provisional patent application was filed on August 17th for a new invention that renders video to web browsers on all computers and devices, including mobile, without requiring advance support or permission from that device or manufacturer.
Because there is no standard format for online video, content owners currently have to provide a separate version of their media file to support each device and operating system. This transcoding process is labor intensive and expensive and requires multiple copies of the exact same content to be stored redundantly in different formats. Compression artifacts are cumulative, so transcoding causes a progressive loss of quality with each successive generation, known as digital generation loss. Destiny’s invention provides a cacheable, cross platform standard compatible with all web servers and browsers, saving up to 90% on bandwidth costs, while ensuring a nearly 100% playback rate without any effort from the consumer.
Comments company CEO, Steve Vestergaard, “The summer of 2011 has seen a flurry of activity surrounding the so called “smartphone patent wars” being waged in the US and elsewhere. Some of the largest technology companies in the world have been buying up patent portfolios and stepping up their efforts to enforce their IP rights against their competitors, so we’re very pleased to file an application for an invention in the space which we believe will be very valuable commercially.
Online video for mobile is growing rapidly, but because of a lack of standards, it’s costly for publishers to create content that works cross platform. Either customers don’t have the right CODEC or plug-in player installed or their device doesn’t provide support for that format at all. The proposed HTML 5 standard, which will eliminate the need for maintaining and updating plug-ins, will make the process somewhat easier for consumers, but video producers will still be required to create multiple copies of the same video in proprietary formats to support various browsers.”
Popular video players such as Windows Media Player, Quicktime and Flash are implemented in different versions for each operating system and CPU and in the case of mobile, can require that they are explicitly supported ahead of time by the device. In a heartfelt letter posted to Apple’s website in April 2010, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, explained why he will not allow the most popular video format, Flash, on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Flash also doesn’t play on Windows Phone 7 and Android 2.1 or less devices.
Destiny’s invention will enable publishers to create a single high quality video which will confidently play on any device and operating system that can access a web page. A commercial version of Destiny’s solution is expected to be released by the end of the year. Destiny’s current streaming video solutions, branded as Clipstream®, require Java to be included as part of the browser, so although they are cross platform, devices which don’t support Java, such as the iPhone and iPad do not support them. This new solution will work on all operating systems and devices.
