Dirac From The BBC

A story on the open-source video encoding technology Dirac, which has come out of BBC’s R&D labs. BBC boasts that the new approach to high-quality video compression is different from that used in the main proprietary or standard video compression systems, typically from tech heavyweights like Microsoft , Apple and RealNetworks.

Will it cut into MSFT’s dominance and other players. “Microsoft is giving away a lot of the technology for content owners to encode their offerings. The content guy will tell you they’re already paying nothing. Unless this product is technically superior and blows everything away, the content guys aren’t going to bother with it“, according to Yankee Group analyst Mike Goodman.

On the other hand, “The BBC name doesn’t hurt. A BBC effort that is truly open source could be very appealing, especially in Europe where there are strong feelings about not letting an American company become too dominant,” according to Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox.

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