• silicon.com
• Technology
• Networks

By Heather McLean, 13 February 2002 16:45

NEWS Apple has been accused of confusing the video streaming market through its attitude to industry standards. The company has signed a deal with Sun Microsystems and Ericsson to develop an open standard system that will deliver multimedia content to wireless devices based around the MPEG-4 video encoding standard. However, Michelle de Lussanet, telecommunications analyst at Forrester Research, told silicon.com: "These different standards, which aren't rightly named 'standard' if only three manufacturers are involved in making it, simply create another demand on networks to convert another standard." She added: "We don't need any more standards out there. Apple, Sun and Ericsson should use those currently available." The standard will use Apple's QuickTime media player to create and format content, Sun's products for content distribution and Ericsson's mobile infrastructure for telecoms operators. Apple yesterday announced it was unhappy with new licence fee demands on MPEG-4 that raised the price of streaming by two cents per minute. As MPEG-4 is the basis of Apple's QuickTime internet video format, concerns for the further development of QuickTime were raised. The company was unable to comment on the current status of licensing negotiations with MPEG LA, the licensing house that controls MPEG-4 fees. QuickTime was chosen to be the file format for MPEG-4 by the International Organisation for Standards.