Known as DivX, the technology has until now has been most closely associated with growing piracy of Hollywood movies on the Internet. But DivXNetworks, the company behind the format, is determined to put its bootleg past behind it and become a viable purveyor of legal downloads and full-blown video-on-demand services.
Although RealNetworks and Microsoft have dominated in this arena, analysts said video technology on the Net remains an open race partly because the quality of current offerings leaves a lot to be desired.
The race for the killer codec comes as Hollywood studios are beginning to position themselves for the day consumers can call up programming over cable or computer networks on demand. Last week, for instance, Walt Disney and News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox studios announced plans to create a joint video-on-demand (VOD) service. That announcement followed a deal struck in mid-August between AOL Time Warner, Sony, Vivendi Universal, Viacom's Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount to develop a similar service.
Microsoft could pose a further headache for DivXNetworks down the road for a different reason: The original version of DivX was essentially based on a Microsoft implementation of MPEG-4.
"The DivX technology lineage is based on using Microsoft technology and re-branding it as its own," said Michael Aldridge, Microsoft's product manager for the Windows Digital Media Division. Aldridge also said that Microsoft's lawyers are looking at current implementations of DivX, but would not comment on legal questions relating to the origin of the codec.
DivXNetworks admits that early versions of the codec did rely in part on Microsoft technology but says the most recent versions represent a clean break. "The (new) codecs were built from scratch," said a company spokesman.
News source: CNet News
