Pulsent Breaks Bandwidth Bottleneck

Stealth Team of Scientists Revolutionizes Video Processing & Delivery Technology to be Privately Previewed at National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas

SILICON VALLEY, Calif. -- March 25, 2002 -- After four years of stealth development by a handpicked team of scientists, mathematicians and engineers, Pulsent Corporation today revealed a radical new approach to video compression that finally breaks the technical and practical barriers to delivering true broadcast quality video over broadband networks.

   Pulsents technology provides a 400 percent improvement in bandwidth and storage efficiency over existing block-based video compression schemes like MPEG-2. The breakthrough enables telephone companies and other service providers for the first time to deliver full-screen, broadcast-quality video into the home at 1.1 Mbps -- with the same clarity and resolution that television viewers have come to expect.

The market impact of Pulsents technology includes delivery of broadcast video services over ADSL, quadrupling the amount of programming that can be stored on personal video recorders (PVRs), dramatically increasing cable or satellite channel capacity, delivering on the promise of video-on-demand (VOD) and high-definition television (HDTV) in the near future.

   Todays approaches to video compression have run out of gas," said Pulsents co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Adityo Prakash. 20+ year-old block-based technologies like MPEG and its proprietary offshoots just cant be improved significantly. The industry has long needed a fundamental rethinking of how video is processed and delivered to enable the next generation of services and applications. That is what weve achieved."

   This accomplishment required the Pulsent team to re-address almost every aspect of video processing -- resulting in over 200 fundamental patents filed and in process. Steering clear of traditional thinkers, the founders personally recruited team members with proven talent for innovation from a broad range of disciplines.

Conceptual breakthroughs seldom come from the usual suspects," said Eniko Fodor, co-founder and chief corporate development officer. We were challenging virtually every prevailing assumption in the field -- that takes a uniquely creative and flexible intellect. As a result, our team has developed a completely original approach to one of the biggest problems in the industry: how to deliver true broadcast quality video in spite of the limitations of todays network infrastructure."

Pulsents technology is truly a brilliant piece of work," said Robert F. Rice, a pioneer in digital signal processing who invented the widely used Rice Algorithms" while at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. The amazing performance of Pulsents breakthrough video compression technology is the result of a paradigm shift in approach, an extraordinary team and a lot of hard work. Pulsent is laying the foundation for the next generation of digital video applications and services. Its truly a disruptive technology."

Current Video Compression Techniques Have Maxed Out

Todays leading video technologies, such as MPEG, utilize a block-based" approach to compressing digital video information. This method divides a video frame into arbitrary blocks of a given size, then removes redundancies by attempting to match and reuse blocks from previous frames for the current frame. When first explored in the 1970s and 80s, this approach was a significant advancement in compression -- enabling the storage and transmission of digital television signals at 4 Mbps. Since then, investigations by academia and industry have resulted in only limited, incremental improvements in compression. Why is block-based video reaching its limits?

The efficiency of block-based video compression relies on its ability to predict the next frame using blocks, a method known as block-based motion compensation." Over the years, refinements in motion compensation and correction of remaining errors, called residue coding, have played a major role in improving the performance of block-based compression schemes. However, these block-based approaches have inherent limitations since arbitrary blocks bear no resemblance to real objects in natural image sequences. The potential for dramatic improvements in these schemes has been thoroughly explored and exhausted over the last 20 years.

How Pulsents Object-Based Paradigm Is Different

Pulsents innovative approach to video compression side-steps the constraints of block-based methods by processing video images in a fundamentally different way. Pulsents technology identifies the true structural elements (objects") in any video scene and efficiently models their motion. Pulsents objects" are the natural, elastic constituent components of any image and they directly correspond to parts of real-world objects. Once identified, the frame-to-frame motion of these objects" can be far more accurately modeled than with block-based approaches.

To insure the most accurate modeling possible, Pulsent has developed numerous patent-pending techniques for detecting and representing object movements and changes such as size modifications, rotations, occlusions, lighting changes and fades. Pulsents highly accurate frame-to-frame modeling results in a 400 percent improvement in video compression efficiency over MPEG-2, enabling broadcast quality video at 1.1 Mbps. Additionally, Pulsents technology will enable a host of new applications, products and business opportunities in the areas that can benefit from object manipulation.

Designed For Co-Existence with Industry Standards

While Pulsents compression techniques are unique within the industry, its video payloads are designed for compatible transmission through standard MPEG Transport Stream protocols. Thus, Pulsent video can be delivered through existing network and satellite infrastructures currently supporting MPEG video streams.

Pulsent products will support side-by-side handling of other codecs such as MPEG, ensuring compatibility with existing applications. The company also anticipates the use of its compression to efficiently transcode" video between MPEG and Pulsent formats.    For example, a Pulsent transcoder at the head-end of a video delivery network could receive programming available in MPEG-2 and transcode it into Pulsent format to insure very efficient video transmission through the network infrastructure, including the last-mile.

About Pulsent

Pulsent Corporation is spearheading the next generation of digital video processing and transmission with its innovative algorithms, software and hardware technologies for efficient storage and delivery of digital video. The development of this technology during the past four years has generated over 200 patents filed or in process. Pulsents video compression solution provides a 400% improvement in bandwidth and storage efficiency over existing block-based technologies like MPEG-2, enabling broadcast quality video at 1.1 Mbps. Pulsents product offerings will support existing MPEG-based technologies, provide real-time transcoding between formats and be fully interoperable with all major network architectures. The Silicon Valley-based company, founded by Adityo Prakash and Eniko Fodor, has assembled a world-class team of scientists, engineers and marketing professionals dedicated to creating and marketing technologies and products that will shape the future of digital video for decades to come.

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For more information visit Pulsents website at http://www.pulsent.com or contact:

Ron Richter
Pulsent Corporation
408-895-6060
rrichter@pulsent.com
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For press inquires only contact:
Bill Ryan
Ryan Communications
888-247-7926
bill@ryan-communications.com