Flash® video and user generated content on TV becomes a reality with Oregan™ Media Browser

Monday, December 17th, 2007
Oregan Networks logo

LONDON, UK — Oregan Networks, an expert in lightweight web browsing technologies for mainstream non-PC Consumer Electronics (CE), has today released a technology feature that makes it possible for consumers to access and control Adobe® Flash® streaming video directly on TV, thus broadening entertainment and communications options for the mass market audience of TV viewers. Oregan Media Browser now seamlessly delivers user generated content, such as YouTube and MySpace, as well as facilitating search of such media via universal and specialised search engines, including Blinkx and Google.

With its implementation, Oregan addresses the critical issues that have obstructed a larger scale uptake of Flash video on TV: video streaming latencies, and high memory and CPU power requirements. To achieve a smooth TV viewing experience during progressive streaming of Flash video content over broadband, Oregan’s media player works behind the scenes, improving the ‘Quality of Service’ by intelligently caching the stream as it arrives, thus enabling the video codecs to perform more efficiently.

Oregan’s success to date has been defined by its core offering: a slimline media streaming engine which utilises Oregan’s advanced W3C standards-based TV browser as a user interface technology. The company’s philosophy is based on the principle that a user interface on TV is ultimately a means to locating and consuming desired audio-visual content, regardless of source. This approach has motivated the technologists at Oregan to develop an ‘intelligent’ media browser that streams and efficiently renders commercial rights-managed high-definition content and user-generated video, regardless of whether it’s part of a home video collection or is delivered in real-time from one of the social networking sites or commercial movie rental services.

Milya Timergaleyeva, VP Marketing at Oregan said ‘In its ten years of operations, Oregan has been aggressively targeting the challenges of browsing the Internet on less powerful CE devices. Understanding the dynamics of the TV-centric market, the pressures of commoditisation and the implication of software footprint size on the Bill of Materials underlies Oregan’s leading expertise in balancing increasing functionalities and options versus the agility and memory consumption of its software.’

As consumers become more discerning of the quality of CE products and more technically sophisticated and involved with devices and content, personal convenience and quality of experience will increasingly determine purchase or subscription decisions. Oregan is committed to making creation, delivery and consumption of connected devices and services simple for every participant of the value chain – from hardware manufacturer to the end consumer.’

Flash video rendering capability is an evolution of Oregan’s clean-room implementation of the Adobe Flash vector graphics rendering engine, which has been implemented in a range of interactive connected product lines by global brands such as Sony PlayStation in Europe and NTT in Japan. It is closely integrated with other media delivery components of Oregan Media Browser, making it possible for service operators to deliver Flash video via XHTML and Flash user interfaces in a full-screen mode, as well as in a Picture in Picture mode in conjunction with broadcast programming.