Envivio Inc., the leading technology provider of MPEG-4 (including AVC/H.264) systems powering mobile to HD applications, and Medialive, a leading digital content protection company, announced today they are engaging in a technical collaboration to integrate Envivio Mobile Series of encoders with Medialive's content protection technology. The collaboration enables customers of both companies to benefit from the highest security features protecting both digital content and "rights" holders.

The Medialive digital content protection technology is based on a physiological analysis of the human ear and vision and the way images and sounds are perceived. The result of this analysis leads to the removal of 1 % (or less) of the digital audio and video content to make it impossible to understand from a human perception standpoint, thus providing the content industry with an unprecedented multimedia content protection solution. The Envivio Mobile Series of H.263/H.264 encoders is the most deployed mobile encoder on the worldwide market with over 1000 shipped and by interoperating with Medialive will now present an even stronger offering for Tier 1 carriers.

"We are collaborating with Medialive because of the high quality of their DRM technology and the unique approach they've adopted to resolve one of the key problems associated with mobile TV - protecting the content," said Julien Signes, President of Envivio Inc.

"We wanted our customers to have the best mobile encoders along with the best digital content protection system. By combining the power of our technology with Envivio encoders, operators can now select a solution that's proven and secure," said Didier Lesteven, CEO of Medialive.

Mobile video services are accelerating wireless data revenues and their popularity is fueling the growth of 3G subscribers, however DRM remains an ongoing concern for content providers who fear that the content will be misused or uploaded to the Internet. During Q1 of 2005, 3G subscribers reached 23 million and by the end of 2005 had reached 50 million. According to Arc Group's estimate, mobile streaming video service users will grow to 250 million worldwide by 2008, generating revenues of approximately $5.4 billion.

"The protection of content, whether it be the video image or the accompanying audio, is the single most important concern for the content providers," added Lesteven. "To address this concern, we are working with Tier 1 carriers to demonstrate that our combined Envivio/Medialive solution offers the highest quality encoding and security as well as greater flexibility for their business models."

Envivio is the first and only company providing a line of open standards-based MPEG-4 hardware and software, multiprotocol (3GPP, DVB-H and ISDB-T and upcoming support of DMB) systems for encoding mobile video. In order to provide end-to-end solutions for telco operators, Envivio is creating a series of strategic partnerships with complementary technologies that will make Envivio mobile TV solutions difficult to match as it offers customers the flexibility to chose from a variety of partners in order to meet project requirements.