Bristol, England - 23 NOV 06 - Ocean Blue Software, the digital TV software developer, has released a free Buyer's Guide to help retailers avoid Freeview box returns. The new guide, available to download from http://www.oceanbluesoftware.co.uk/publications.html provides a straightforward overview of specifications and requirements for Freeview boxes, and should help consumer electronics retailers avoid buying sub-standard product.
The industry has experienced product returns of over 10 per cent on Freeview products, says Ocean Blue, in part due to non-compliance and poor quality product. This is the result of a highly price-driven market, and a lack of product understanding.
"Beyond the major product brands like Sony and Philips, which we all assume produce compliant product, there is a wide range of product quality. This guide will particularly help CE buyers who are sourcing low cost product from the Far East and Asia, which can be difficult without definitive guidelines."
Ocean Blue's own MHEG-5 software suite, designed for Freeview set-top boxes, became one of the first to achieve DTG conformance. The test, completed this month uses the DTG Test Suite v3.0.1 for the MHEG-5 UK Profile Specification v1.06.
Digital UK, the not-for-profit, independent group set up to oversee digital switchover, has detailed its plans to switch off analogue broadcasts across the country between 2008-2012. The move will prompt further growth of the set-top box market, as the remaining non-digital households are forced to switch, and secondary sets in other households are converted to Freeview.
Ocean Blue's Voyager software system MHEG-5 & DSM-CC is the result of a more than 10 man-year development project and is fully tested and in production.. The MHEG-5 & DSM-CC software was developed in the standard C programming language and is thus portable to many different operating systems and hardware computing platforms.
Ocean Blue's Sunrise is a suite of integrated software products, which provides all the functionality for receiving digital video & audio on digital set top boxes and televisions.
Ocean Blue's Surfsoft system software is used to on-screen manage and control TV content that has been saved on a hard disk-based digital TV device. Surfsoft's many features and functions include time shift, trick modes, search, retrieve, save, record, timed recording and pause.
For further information or pictures please contact:
Ken Helps