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TI and Partners Offer Consumers Access to Digital Media Content Anywhere In The House

Comprehensive DSP-Based Streaming Media Platform Enables Multiple Home Networking Products to Store, Display and Distribute a Wide Range of Media Formats

DALLAS, May 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Making digital media content more accessible and user-friendly for consumers, Texas Instruments Incorporated (NYSE: TXN (TI) today announced the availability of the industry's broadest digital signal processor (DSP) based platform of streaming media products and reference designs. TI's solutions enable a myriad of home networking products such as portable handheld devices, streaming media televisions, digital media centers, set-top boxes and residential gateways. Together, these appliances allow consumers to manage, store, display and distribute several media formats inside the digital home and beyond. (See http://www.ti.com/smlaunch .)

TI's solutions span applications ranging from high-performance video to low-cost audio and imaging. These DSP-based products support all media formats including:
H.263, M-JPEG, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, WMV, Quicktime, and DivX for video;
JPEG, GIFF, TIFF, and Bitmap for imaging;
AAC, ATRAC3, MP3, and WMA for audio; and AMR, G.723.1, G.726, G.711 for voice

TI's streaming media products decode locally, making the content format virtually invisible to the consumer and expanding the inherent functionality of the streaming media appliance. In addition, having a programmable core at the heart of the design enables original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to upgrade to new or revised standards through a simple software download. All of these capabilities combine to provide OEMs flexibility to evolve their designs to keep up with ever-changing technology demands.

Consumer Demands Fuel Market Growth

According to Forrester Research, the prerequisites for making the digital home a mass-market reality are converging: consumers are upgrading their peripherals, service providers are offering more than just access and home networking appliances are beginning to connect everything seamlessly. Data from the Yankee Group indicates that approximately 17 million households in
the United States have a broadband connection and 4 million of those download full-length video content on a regular basis.

However, the primary desire of consumers within the digital home is better management of existing or new rich-media content. This desire provides a significant opportunity for service providers, consumer electronics and networking equipment manufacturers to deliver products that make such content easily accessible.

As an example of these new streaming media appliances, Hewlett Packard announced its Digital Media Receiver in January 2003, allowing consumers to browse through their favorite music and photographs stored on their PC. Using TI's DSP-based technology, the Digital Media Receiver allows consumers to
listen to digital music on their stereo and view digital photographs on their TV by accessing the content stored on their PC via a home network connection.

Enabling Digital Media Content Anywhere

Committed to fueling this emerging streaming media market, TI has collaborated with numerous development partners and embedded operating system platforms, empowering consumer electronics and networking OEMs to bring multi- format, multi-functional products to market quickly.

Companies using TI's DSP-based streaming media platform and offering production-ready reference designs include: emuzed, Escient, FedTec, iM Networks, Ingenient, Mediabolic, and Oregon Networks. The following embedded operating systems companies have ported their platforms to TI's streaming media solution:
Accelerated Technologies, Pigeon Point Systems and WindRiver. Companies including DivX, Microsoft, Quicktime and RealNetworks have allowed their media codecs to be ported to TI's streaming media products.

Leveraging TI's technology, and its partners' reference designs, consumer electronics OEMs and networking equipment manufacturers will be able to reduce their design and development time and bring products to market quickly.

"TI's digital media processors make it possible for consumer electronics companies to quickly and cost-effectively integrate Internet audio and network audio capabilities into their product lines," said Elliot Solomon, chief operating officer of iM Networks. "Adding 802.11b and Windows Media support to iM Networks' technology speeds time to market for digital home entertainment offerings and provides value-added features to consumers."

Additionally, subscription service providers including Listen.com and RioPort have endorsed TI's platform. These companies, which allow consumers to store entire music collections virtually, based their endorsement on both TI's robust streaming media solutions and its leading position in broadband. TI has a portfolio of broadband products that link to all of the major broadband technologies including cable, DSL, VoIP and WLAN.

"Streaming technologies supported on TI's targeted platforms makes it easier and more efficient for customers to access and download a vast library of on-demand music through their PC and make that content available anywhere in the home," said Sean Ryan, president and CEO of Listen.com.

Pricing and Availability
TI's streaming media products are available today through both its partners and EVM suppliers Tyrex Services and Spectrum Digital. For more information on these offerings, visit http://www.ti.com/streamingmedia .