What's in the Bluebox? A video-on-demand secret weapon!

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 25 September 2007 13:46

Your IT - Home IT

Melbourne-based startup, Bluebox Devices is developing a near video-on-demand content distribution system that it hopes will challenge the market for rental DVDs.

The company has just announced a partnership with broadband ISP Internode that will make Internode customers the first to get access to the new technology, around mid 2008, but is giving few details as to how it works, or what the eventual go to market strategy will be.

Bluebox CEO, Rob Yearsley, told iTWire: "We have a lot going on in the background and we will be making some announcements in the near future, but we are trying to keep fairly quiet at the moment...We are not yet unveiling the business model which is the really cool bit."

He did say that the technology would be video download, not streaming video, adding "but if you have broadband at 1.5Mbps or above the experience is close to streaming. However we are trying to avoid streaming technologies."

Too achieve this, Bluebox will not be using exotic compression technologies to reduce bandwidth requirements. "We will be using off-the-shelf video compression technology, MPEG4 H.264," Yearsley said. He claimed this worked fine when the traffic does not go over the open Internet but through a direct connection between Bluebox's servers and an ISP, such as Internode's, network.

Yearsley identified a key technology differentiator in the Bluebox system as the user interface. "We have invested a lot of time into the user interface. it is not a skin for Windows Media Player. It is new technology from the ground up with some significant R&D." At launch versions will be available for Windows XP and Vista and or Mac OS X, but Yearsley said other versions were planned.