This is something I noticed last month, but I never got around to posting about it in the lead up to my wedding, but I’m getting caught up on the backlog. Back in January I posted about the news from CES on Sling Media making deals to incorporate their place shifting tech directly into chips from ViXS and Broadcom. At the time I’d missed the news that they weren’t the only player to make such a deal, competitor Monsoon Multimedia did as well.
Similar to the Sling Media deal, Monsoon Multimedia made deals to incorporate their place shifting technology into chips from C2 Microsystems and Zenverge. Moonsoon’s tech has been ported to C2′s Jazz product line and is coming to their Tango chip line.
“Monsoon and C2 Microsystems have been working together now for more than two years,” said Gene Liu, CEO of C2 Microsystems. “Monsoon’s engines are now ported to our Jazz product line. We expect that Monsoon will enable our TV customers in China to start showing OTT streaming from their TVs to smartphones, PCs and tablets in or outside of the home. Our highly cost effective Tango chips will start featuring placeshifting this spring.”
Zenverge is incorporating Monsoon’s tech into their ZN200 Quad-Stream Transcoder. Interestingly it sounds like Monsoon Multimedia is using Zenverge’s chips in their Vulkano products.
“Monsoon is very excited about leveraging the flexible HD transcoding and encoding capabilities of the Zenverge architecture in our Vulkano placeshifting products,” said Colin Stiles, Monsoon’s EVP of Sales and Marketing. “We see great potential in adding multi-stream HD transcoding features to our streaming products and we have selected the ZN200 to provide high value solutions to our OEM customers.”
“We are very excited about the new products our customers are launching to truly enable the connected home and extremely pleased to have Monsoon as both a partner and a customer,” said Shawn Saleem, EVP of Marketing for Zenverge. “Portable devices such as the Apple iPad and iPhone, and Android tablets and cell phones, have created a significant market demand for consuming content wirelessly from multiple sources such as Over-The-Top (OTT) and broadcast. The ZN200 is being used with Monsoon’s industry leading placeshifting technology and provides the perfect solution for streaming in and outside the home.”
Monsoon developed five integrated modules for licensees to use in incorporating their tech:
Adaptive Bit-Rate Encoding continuously measures the available network bandwidth and adjusts the encoding bit rate to deliver smooth video streaming Quality of Service (QOS) over a wide range of network conditions.
Http Live Streaming (HLS) has been extended by Monsoon to support a real-time bit-rate control method of delivering live video sources via the industry standard HLS protocol, without requiring pre-encoding and caching of multiple bit-rate copies of the file.
Proprietary Streaming Protocol moves video from inside the home to outside the home with much finer granularity of the video encoding and without requiring any router set up. UDP protocol with hole punching and Network Address Translator (NAT) traversal is deployed to eliminate the need for router port forwarding.
Connection Management is a secure cloud-based service that allows clients to connect to servers without using fixed IP addresses or Domain Named Service (DNS).
Multi-Screen Client Technologies include video playback of placeshifted live TV streams, recording and trick play (pause, fast forward, rewind) on clients, and virtual on-screen remote control for set-top boxes, EPGs and sideloading. Client technologies are available on PCs, Macs, iPhones and iPads, Android smartphone and tablets, BlackBerry phones and tablets.
Between Sling’s deals and these it seems like we might be seeing place shifting in a growing number of products.
I should note that while TiVo’s upcoming transcoder box is using a chip from Zenverge, it does not use Monsoon’s tech. I explicitly asked about this when I talked to TiVo, just to make sure. TiVo’s box uses a home-grown solution.
