Company broadens format support for its portfolio of industry leading video solutions

On2 Technologies Inc., a leader in video compression software and solutions, announced today an upgrade to its flagship Flix Engine encoding software with the addition of support for H.264 video compression standard. The Flix Engine line currently supports transcoding to H.263 and On2 TrueMotion™ VP6™ compression schemes for the popular FLV format used by Adobe ® Flash ® Player 8 and 9, and H.263 3GPP format used in the mobile video industry. On2 will further expand H.264 support in its Flix product line of desktop, server, and browser based encoding solutions.
The announcement comes on the heels of On2’s pending acquisition of Hantro Products Oy, which develops a broad portfolio of standards based video compression solutions, including H.264, H.263, and VC-1. Combined with its industry leading proprietary TrueMotion VP6™ and VP7™ video compression schemes, On2 will be positioned as a single source for all the leading advanced video compression schemes.

“While On2’s TrueMotion codecs continue to be the torch-bearer in the industry for advances in video compression, our codec expertise applied to H.264 and other standards-based technologies bodes well for customers who want the best implementation of these standards,” said Bill Joll, president and CEO of On2 Technologies. “We are listening to our customers, and at the same time preserving the investment they have made in our products. In addition, by supporting standards based formats we are expanding the opportunities for On2 and addressing a broader market with our video solutions.”

H.264 is the next-generation video compression technology in the MPEG-4 standard, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10. H.264 is widely considered the successor to MPEG-2, which is the currently deployed format for broadcast, cable and satellite television. H.264 is currently deployed for high definition television services, and applications in mobile, portable and consumer electronics devices.

On2 TrueMotion codecs are currently in their seventh generation, and recognized as the best compression schemes in the industry. On2 VP6 is the de-facto standard for web video as a result of its implementation in Adobe Flash Player 8 and 9. On2 VP7 was honored with the 2006 Frost and Sullivan Innovation Award as the best codec on the market.

“One factor that generally goes unrecognized in the market is that the H.264 standard specifies playback or decoding specifications only,” said Paul Wilkins, co-CTO and SVP of research and development at On2. “By applying our years of encoding expertise to standards based encoding we aim to stand out in our implementations of these technologies.”

Flix Engine supporting H.264 will be released in September 2007. H.264 support for other Flix products will be available in Q4, 2007. Licensing for Flix with H.264 will carry additional IP licensing specified by MPEG-LA, the licensing arm of the MPEG consortium, which developed the H.264 standard.

www.on2.com