CMWare Enters the Place-Shifting Industry

Unique technology enables on-demand access to PC applications, user-generated and DRM-protected content stored on PCs

CTIA Wireless, Orlando, Fla. – March 27, 2007 – Emerging place-shifting technologies are giving users unprecedented access to media via their mobile devices, whenever they want it and wherever they are. Today, CMWare announced myMobileMedia, a PC place-shifting solution that provides remote control and access to stored media and applications, including music files, pictures and DRM-protected content.

PCs have become the media center of the home. Digital content is amassing on PC hard drives, yet access to this content has largely been limited to being in front of your PC or transferring content to media players. Increasingly, users want access to their content, any time anywhere. Through CMWare’s patent-pending myPCstream™ technology, users are offered four unique advantages not available by others in the place-shifting space: the ability to place-shift DRM-protected content, remote application control, dynamic stream shaping and transcoding.

CMWare has the capability to place-shift content from the PC to virtually any Symbian smartphone or MP3-enabled Java handset, supporting a larger variety of mobile handsets than any of its competitors and, enabling the subscriber to use myMobileMedia on a device they likely already own. Currently more than 600 million Symbian and Java enabled mobile phones in use globally are myMobileMedia compatible, granting consumers access to media in almost any form. By the end of 2007, this number is predicted to exceed one billion.

CMWare
“People often find themselves in situations where they wished they had access to their media when their PC or portable media player is not convenient or available. myMobileMedia provides instant access to users’ complete media library with the device they most often always carry, their mobile phone,” explains Steve Ott, co-founder, CMWare. “CMWare’s goal when developing myMobileMedia was to design an intuitive, user-friendly service that is fast and works all the time so that users would be inclined to use it every day”.

With myMobileMedia, users can now have on-demand access to their desired content either by place-shifting it from their PC or by synchronizing it to a virtual media locker hosted by CMWare for access via a mobile device. Further, myMobileMedia provides a consistently high quality user experience, ever with harsh network conditions, by dynamically adapting a media stream and shaping it to accommodate significant bandwidth fluctuations. The proprietary techniques myMobileMedia employs provides unprecedented access to PC applications and DRM-protected content without violating DRM restrictions. DRM-protected files are ephemerally, or temporarily, streamed to the mobile device, but not locally stored much as a wireless PC speaker works.

Symbian
“With the emergence of the new smartphone lifestyle, mobile subscribers are continually craving more when it comes to tapping into the full range of features provided on their smartphones and remotely accessing all forms of DRM-protected content such as videos and music files, much of which is stored on the home or office PC,” said Jerry Panagrossi, vice president of US operations, Symbian. “CMWare’s myMobileMedia for Symbian OS offers a unique form of connectedness between consumers and their personal archives of rich-media content through innovative PC place-shifting technology.”

myPCStream Technology

CMWare's approach to PC access is quite different than others’ in the market through its patent-pending core intellectual property, myPCstream. myPCstream offers the following differentiating capabilities:

• Ability to place-shift DRM-protected content – myMobileMedia provides the ability to access DRM-protected content from the PC. By remotely launching the appropriate PC- based media playback application and capturing content as it is played back, myMobileMedia will transcode and stream this content into whatever format the phone will require for playback.

• Remote Application Control – the ability to completely control the PC from a standard mobile phone. With true PC place-shifting, the mobile phone display becomes the PC screen, the keypad the keyboard and the mobile phone speakers become the PC speakers from the audio output. With myPCstream, users can access this content by browsing through their folders on the PC and selecting the desired file. Once selected, the appropriate PC application is run on the PC and the user sees (or hears) the file streamed to the mobile device.

• Dynamic Stream Shaping – myPCstream analyzes the IP network conditions approximately every 100 ms, detecting latency. As latency increases, myPCstream will transrate the stream to fit within the allotted bandwidth. The lower the bandwidth, the lower kbps the stream is transrated into. The higher the bandwidth the higher the kbps (from 16kbps to 160kbps). This results in a continuous stream, over even the harshest network conditions.

• Transcoding – virtually any non-DRM-protected media file format stored on the PC can be streamed or downloaded to a mobile phone. No special conversions are necessary, the technology can work with most media formats and media playlists, providing unlimited access to nearly any media file stored on any computer by decoding the original file into its raw format and then re-encoding it to a format that is supported on the phone.

User Experience

The user experiences myMobileMedia through an easy-to-use and intuitive interface. With a near instantaneous response, users can take advantage of the following robust MP3 player features: songs, playlists, natural progression, search, next/previous and shuffle.

myMobileMedia Availability

myMobileMedia is currently available in the European market and will be available to U.S. customers and other territories, in the summer 2007.

CMWare will be demonstrating its patent-pending myMobileMedia service at CTIA Wireless 2007 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla. March 27-29 in Symbian booth #4464 in hall B4.

About CMWare

CMWare, Inc. is a leading provider of PC place-shifting solutions that create value-added data services revenue streams and enhance subscriber loyalty for mobile carriers. CMWare’s myMobileMedia service is the first complete, turn-key PC place-shifting solution that works over any mobile network to reliably stream digital media from subscribers’ PCs to their mobile devices in any format, including music files such as MP3, M4A, M4P and WMA, as well as pictures and DRM-protected content. myMobileMedia is powered by CMWare’s patent-pending myPCStream™ technology that extends the content and applications stored on PCs to the broad range of mobile handsets used by consumers. For more information, visit http://www.cmware.com.

Tags: place-shifting, placeshifting, place shifting, mobile media, mobile device

Media Enquiries

John Cashman CMWare 1-609-750-8614

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