SpeedBit, based in Herzliya and Haifa, is about
to present its novel video accelerator. Chief
Technology Officer Idan Feigenbaum said,
thatSpeedBit has managed to shrink the download
time for a full-length feature to about 40
minutes over a 5 Megabit-per-second (Mbps)
Internet connection. At the higher speeds
available in some countries, that could be
slashed to 20 minutes or less.
Reducing the time to download movies to around 15
minutes is expected to result in a big upsurge in
penetration of this market.
That should also come as welcome news to big
companies that have bet on Internet video. Retail
giant Wal-Mart (WMT) launched its
much-anticipated video download service in
February, following the 2006 introduction of
videos on Apple's (AAPL) iTunes. Amazon.com
(AMZN) and Microsoft's (MSFT) MSN also now offer
streaming or downloadable videos.
But Wal-Mart has reported that only 3,000 movies
were downloaded in the first month of its
service. And though Blockbuster (BBI) looks
likely to introduce video downloads by the end of
this year, it is already cautioning that the
business probably won't take off for another year
or two.
SpeedBit uses complex algorithms to optimize
available bandwidth-in effect, downloading
different chunks of a video simultaneously over
multiple Internet connections, rather than in a
single stream.
The technology behind the video accelerator was
originally developed by SpeedBit to shorten
software downloads. The company's Download
Accelerator Plus (DAP) software program,
introduced in 1999, has already amassed nearly
140 million users.
The company has been profitable nearly from its
outset but will not reveal any further financial
details.
Downloading a movie or a TV episode over the
Internet may become a reality in the near future.
SpeedBit an Israeli startup called says it has
devised a solution that can dramatically
accelerate video downloading over the Net-even
with a high-speed Net connection. A full-length
movie clocking in at 1.5 gigabytes still takes
hours to buy and download.