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A bitter Wireless Home Digital Interface war is set to kick off with Sony, Samsung and Sharp along with several other consumer electronic Companies set to back a brand new wireless technology that allows high definition video signals to be sent wirelessly from a single set-top box to TVs and monitors.
The consortium due to be announced today in the USA is a ground breaking development in the race to eliminate cables in the home. Both Sony and Samsung are also supporting a competing technology.
According to the Washington Post the new consortium of Sony and Samsung Electronics, along with Motorola Sharp and Hitachi, will develop an industry standard around technology from Amimon Ltd. of Israel called WHDI, for Wireless Home Digital Interface.
“If you have a TV in the home, that TV will be able to access any source in the home, whether it’s a set-top box in the living room, or the PlayStation in the bedroom, or a DVD player in another bedroom. That’s the message of WHDI,” said Noam Geri, co-founder of Amimon.
Amimon is already selling chips that fulfill part of that promise, but the creation of a broad industry group makes it more likely that consumers will be able to buy WHDI-enabled devices from different manufacturers and have them all work together.
Geri expects TVs with Amimon’s chips to reach stores next year, costing about $100 more than equivalent, non-wireless TVs.
Wireless streaming of high-definition video is a relatively tricky engineering problem that many companies are trying to tackle. It can be done with the fastest versions of Wi-Fi, a technology already in many homes, but that requires “compression,” or reduction of the data rate, with picture quality degrading as a result. There’s also a delay in transmission as chips on both ends of the link work to compress, then decompress the image.
That’s prompted much research into radio technologies that are faster, requiring less compression. A leading contender is WirelessHD, centered on technology from SiBEAM Ia US company. It uses an open portion of the radio band, at 60 gigahertz, for ultrafast transmission of uncompressed video, but it could be years away from commercialization. Its range is limited, meaning that it would be used for in-room links rather than whole-house networking, like WHDI.
Sony is part of the WirelessHD group as well, and is supporting WHDI to have “wider options,” the company said in a statement.
Samsung, on the other hand, looks at WHDI as a stopgap technology until the higher-picture-quality WirelessHD takes over. JaeMoon Jo, Samsung’s vice president of TV research, said the company believes WirelessHD will be the “ultimate solution in the long run.”
Still another contending wireless technology is ultra-wideband, or UWB. It requires less compression than Wi-Fi, but its range is more limited, generally to in-room networking. Monster Cable Products Inc. plans to introduce a kit that produces a wireless video link using UWB.
WHDI is less exotic than either WirelessHD or UWB. It uses a radio band at 5 gigahertz that’s used by some Wi-Fi devices, which means it can take advantage of research in that field. To get around the limitations of the limited bandwidth, Amimon uses a clever trick instead of compression.
For more on this story see the Washington Post
