By Allan Maurer
MCLEAN, VA—You may not realize it, but most of the time you are not watching full high definition TV or listening to full HD audio on that expensive equipment you bought. “In today’s market the HD experience is impaired,” says George Gonzalez, CEO and founder of XstreamHD, a company planning to change all that.
Today’s mass market distributors of HD content simply cannot stream all the data necessary for full 1080p resolution over the Internet, cable, or wireless satellite transmissions, says Gonzalez. “ ”As the HD revolution continues, transport networks are the limiting factor. Their inability to deliver Full HD robs consumers of the ideal home theater experience,” he says.
Currently, no TV stations or cable or satellite networks broadcast or deliver content in 1080p (progressive). They send either 720p or 1080i (not as high a resolution as 1080p) signals. Only HD DVDS provide a full HD experience.
Xstream has developed technology to deliver a real “theatre experience” over satellite links, Gonzalez says. The company plans to unveil its products at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas in January, 2008 and have it up and running by the third quarter next year.
“XstreamHD’s proprietary technology powers a network, independent of existing infrastructure, which xstreams Full HD video and lossless audio to the home more efficiently than any other existing network,” Gonzalez says.
The technology includes customized integrated circuits and algorithms to transmit data over geosynchronous satellites at “an unprecedented level of quality. You’ll have the ability to receive movies at home at higher resolution than HD DVDs. In the audio domain alone it’s unmatched.” He says it can deliver 7.1 channels of lossless audio.
The company’s products include a media server and a media receiver. Gonzalez says the pair will probably be available for under $400. “We want it to be competitive,” he says. The media server will be able to deliver the HD content to multiple home devices.
Founded in 2002, the 26-person company is privately funded and has not received venture backing and is not looking for it, says Gonzalez, who previously founded iDirect, which created a widely used bi-directional satellite broadband router that uses networking protocol acceleration algorithms to achieve high throughput.
If iDirect’s success is any guide—the company sold to Singapore Technologies Engineering for $165 million in cash in 2005, Xstream should do well.
Gonzalez says subscriptions to the company’s service will be more comparable to the price of monthly DVD rentals than to cable or satellite services, but it will not carry cable satellite programming.
On the Web: www.xstreamhd.com
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