Campbell, Calif. –
Technology company
expects
first-quarter availability of the first rights-protected movies sold on MicroSD
cards for playback on Android smartphones and Android tablets.
The company
expects the cards’ prices to compete with DVD prices.
The cards would use
rights-protection technology developed by the company and already used to sell about
25 movies worldwide on USB drives, including USB movies sold in the U.S. through
Fry’s Electronics and OfficeMax, the company said.
The movies will
make their way to the Android OS now that the company has developed the Mo-DV
Universal Player app to play movies on Android smartphones, whose popularity
has surged, the company said. The app works on Android phones using the 2.1 and
later OS.
Work is also
underway to bring the Mo-DV Universal Player app to BlackBerry v. 5.0 and later
smartphones, Windows Phone 7 smartphones, and feature phones that support Java-
and BREW-based applications, the company said.
A Mo-DV Universal
Player app already available for PCs to play the USB-stored movies will also
play the MicroSD-stored movies, the company said. The PC app is compatible with
desktops and laptops running Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7.
Movies offered on
the cards will be playable on any platform for which a Mo-DV app may become available,
including tablets and other cellphones, the company added.
Because Mo-DV’s
technology “allows the playback of protected content across multiple platforms,
it eliminates the need to create separate SKUs for each platform,” the company
noted.
A Mo-DV Universal
Player app has been available for earlier smartphones based on the Windows
Mobile 5 and 6 operating systems cellphones based on the Symbian S60 OS, but
sales of those products in the U.S. have been limited. The past opportunities
for movies on MicroSD, added chief technology officer Eric Hamilton, “have had
limited market receptivity,” but market receptivity “has accelerated with
movies being included in iTunes for Apple devices.” As a result, he said, “the
landscape for adoption of movies on other mobile devices is improving.”
The company’s
technology can be used in any type of flash-memory format, the company said.
Although new smartphones
have appeared with the ability to download movies on demand via Wi-Fi, Hamilton
said, movies stored on smartphone-compatible cards would deliver a superior
experience. Downloading via Wi-Fi or cellular “would take a lot of time if you
want high quality,” he said. Movies stored on flash memory using Mo-DV
technology will deliver higher resolution, he said.
Although it is
possible to stream movies over Wi-Fi or cellular, streaming creates
quality-of-service problems such as frame freezes and takes up so much
bandwidth that streamed files must use low resolution, he noted.
Although Mo-DV’s
technology locks a movie to a USB drive or memory card, it enables users to
output the movie to a connected TV for viewing on a larger screen, the company
said.
