Sonic Solutions To Compete In At-Home HD Streaming Game
Sonic Solutions has been doing itself quite a few favors of late, linking up with Blockbuster and even bringing CinemaNow films to USB flash drives. Today, however, it's really kicking things up a notch. In an effort to take on the likes of Vudu, Netflix and even Microsoft's Xbox 360 streaming service, Sonic has announced a new platform to bring HD streaming right to one's television.
The new CineVision Adaptive HD technology is described as a next-generation encoding, multiplexing, streaming and decoding system designed specifically to deliver the highest quality HD video possible to internet-connected CE devices. In other words, Internet-connected TVs and set top boxes could soon be pulling down 1080p movies from Sonic's CinemaNow service. Said system is already used in Blu-ray title production, and while we're somewhat skeptical of the image quality, we're told that it's pretty smart about whittling 1080p material down to a size that's streamer-friendly.
Mark Ely, executive vice president of strategy for Sonic Solutions, seems to have his head in the right place:
CineVision Adaptive HD is said to be the "world's first encoding solution to combine the compression parameters mandated by video mastering engineers with the multi-bandwidth encoding, multiplexing, and formatting required to ensure seamless delivery of HD streams to connected CE devices." Of course, we're still waiting to hear what kind of devices will support this new content delivery, but we'd say the HD home movie game just got significantly more interesting.
The new CineVision Adaptive HD technology is described as a next-generation encoding, multiplexing, streaming and decoding system designed specifically to deliver the highest quality HD video possible to internet-connected CE devices. In other words, Internet-connected TVs and set top boxes could soon be pulling down 1080p movies from Sonic's CinemaNow service. Said system is already used in Blu-ray title production, and while we're somewhat skeptical of the image quality, we're told that it's pretty smart about whittling 1080p material down to a size that's streamer-friendly.
Mark Ely, executive vice president of strategy for Sonic Solutions, seems to have his head in the right place:
"Consumers not only want instant access to new Hollywood hit movies on their connected TVs and Blu-ray players, they want it in HD. In collaboration with Widevine, we've been able to enhance our world-class CineVision encoding system to prepare content for pristine viewing on the coming wave of connected CE devices -- without requiring CE manufacturers to put costly hard drives in their products."
CineVision Adaptive HD is said to be the "world's first encoding solution to combine the compression parameters mandated by video mastering engineers with the multi-bandwidth encoding, multiplexing, and formatting required to ensure seamless delivery of HD streams to connected CE devices." Of course, we're still waiting to hear what kind of devices will support this new content delivery, but we'd say the HD home movie game just got significantly more interesting.
