The Hindu : National : Indian brains behind portable version of Windows Media Centre

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 12, 2006

National

National

Indian brains behind portable version of Windows Media Centre

Anand Parthasarathy

Technology to be developed by a 50-member team of Bangalore-based engineers

PURE ENTERTAINMENT: Ittiam CEO Srini Rajam (centre) and some members of his team behind the range of video and entertainment devices on display.

Bangalore: The last week of February will see a leading entertainment device maker in the Asia-Pacific region unveil the first portable version of Microsoft's Windows Media Centre — a PC-TV convergence technology that brings music, video and computing together. Hitherto available on desktops and some laptops, the portable Media Centre will be as functional as a hand-held machine with a 13-cm flat-screen and have enough memory to store dozens of movies and thousands of music tracks.

But the technology fuelling the device will be created by a 50-strong team of engineers at an Indian chip design company — Ittiam Systems — that in a survey last week was adjudged "the world's most preferred supplier of digital signal processing-based Intellectual Property (IP)," for the second successive year.

The survey was carried out by global market researchers, Forward Concepts, whose president, Will Strauss, told The Hindu : "Ittiam has come on top again, in our worldwide ratings of DSP IP providers from 32 countries ... This is a significant achievement. With the survey targeting key designers from customer organisations, the finding is an accurate reflection."

During 2005 — the year covered in the survey — Bangalore-based Ittiam delivered the technology behind a slew of video-based products: a portable media player and recorder; a networked media player, which latched on wirelessly to the Internet for high-speed streaming of video content; and a video phone harnessing Internet telephony to allow users to see those they were speaking to.

Ittiam's Chairman and CEO Srini Rajam explained on Saturday that over 50 manufacturers worldwide had already licensed their technology for various products.

The company developed a special set of video codes that enabled Microsoft's Media Centre software to be "shrunk," run on a Texas Instruments chip and ported on to a small hand-held platform.

The working model of the portable Media Centre drew a lot of attention when Ittiam demonstrated it at a recent consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, U.S.

Their first licensee will roll out a product within two weeks.

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