Bristol - March 20, 2007

Ocean Blue Software, the specialist digital TV software developer, has released a Linux version of its Sunrise, Voyager and SurfSoft software products, with ports to the leading hardware platforms complete or well under way. The company reports that Linux is emerging as the preferred platform for developers of set top boxes, particularly at the high end, such as Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) and IPTV.

Recent introductions by Ocean Blue include Linux versions of the company's software, including MHEG-5 (for Freeview " Press Red" functionality) support, for the multi-purpose NXP Nexperia chipsets and Toshiba's Donau system-on-chip (SoC).

"The major chipset manufacturers are introducing new Linux platforms almost monthly," commented Ken Helps, Managing Director of Ocean Blue Software. "IT vendors that wish to produce products for the Digital Home and are used to working with Linux in the past, now have the option of using Linux-based DVB and MHEG-5 digital TV software products. The Linux operating system features in many of the new raft of IPTV set top boxes, being powerful enough to support advanced functions but not requiring a license fee. All the industry reports indicate strong growth in this area and we are developing our software to support most platforms."

NXP's (formally Philips Semi-conductors) Nexperia range of chipsets support home entertainment products, audio description and the latest AV codecs (H.264, WM9), creating an advanced platform for building IP set top boxes and dual functionality set top box products.

Codenamed Donau, Toshiba's high performance system-on-chip (SoC) devices simplify the design and dramatically reduce time to market. The platforms combine Toshiba's media embedded processor (MeP) architecture with a 64-bit embedded RISC host processor to create multimedia SoCs with compute performances of up to 650MIPS (at 180MHz).

These combined hardware and software solutions with advanced features will allow development of IP set top boxes for the digital home with technology features such as video telephony, picture improvements, broadband TV, time-shift recording, support for Freeview channels, DVD playback, storage, personal video recording, network connectivity and even voice over IP(VoiP).