Posted on Wednesday, October 27 @ 09:55:07 PDT by samc

C/Net says DivX Networks may get two major Hollywood studios supporting its technology by Christmas.

DivX already has a partnership with News Corp.`s 20th Century Fox to encode films for an airline movie-rental service. Now its video file format will be used in planned Internet video-on-demand services that would be available to consumers by the first half of 2005, DivX President Shahi Ghaman told CNET News.com at the Consumer Technology Ventures Conference.

Ghaman expects deals with all five of the major Hollywood studios eventually, citing the industry`s desire to back an alternative to Microsoft and the pending next generation of the Windows operating system, code-named Longhorn.

``Anyone who has read a speck about Longhorn becomes terrified of it and becomes a friend of DivX,`` he said.

Billions of files encoded in DivX have changed hands over the years without the industry`s OK, leading some to label the format the MP3 of video. But DivX Networks has developed technology to prevent unauthorized copying.

Movie download services include studio-backed movie download service MovieLink, Walt Disney`s over-the-air MovieBeam service, Starz Encore, CinemaNow and a newly launched Internet VOD service from Akimbo. Movielink and SBC Yahoo!, which provides DSL services to more than 3.1 million subs, will trial the service via a promotional site that will offer movie downloads between $1.99 and $4.99 per title. Movie rental giant Netflix may also go the on-line route. Most movie download services use Microsoft`s Windows Media format.

But entertainment companies are looking to new video formats for downloading. Alternatives include MPEG-4 and proprietary technology from Microsoft and RealNetworks` Helix platform.

Tacoma, Wash.-based airline movie-rental service APS uses DivX to encode programming provided by 20th Century Fox and other content owners. Alaska Airlines currently uses APS` digEplayer media players, which store up to 30 full-length movies and other content.

Ghaman said DivX Networks expects to unveil the latest version of its software, DivX 6.0, in the fourth quarter of 2004. Ghaman said the upgrade offers 33 percent better compression than H.264, the latest video codec approved for use in the MPEG-4 standard.