Digital Fountain's ToughStream(TM) Engine Simplifies Integration of Forward Error Correction (FEC) into IPTV and Internet TV Applications; Protects Streams from Impairments, Enabling Perfect Quality.

FREMONT, Calif. -- Digital Fountain, Inc., the leading supplier of advanced FEC (forward error correction) technology for reliable communications, announced today the availability of the DF ToughStream Engine for streaming applications including IPTV and Internet TV. ToughStream provides application and equipment vendors with the easiest way to incorporate FEC technology into streaming applications. ToughStream "makes streams tough," protecting video and audio streams from common impairments including packet loss, latency and jitter and lost packets typical of IP networks, allowing reliable and efficient delivery to the end-user without interruptions.

Employing Digital Fountain's patented DF Raptor(TM) FEC technology that was standardized in 2005 by both 3GPP (the world's largest cellular standards organization) and DVB-H (the leading mobile broadcasting standard), the ToughStream Engine minimizes bandwidth overhead and all-but eliminates buffering delays by recovering lost packets without requiring retransmission. Any packetized stream can be protected, independent of the type of media encoding or compression, data rate, or use of encryption.

"The secret is out and network architects are realizing that FEC enables TV-grade delivery over IP while eliminating the requirement to over-provision networks," said Charlie Oppenheimer, CEO of Digital Fountain. "The ToughStream Engine allows developers of IPTV and Internet TV applications to quickly bring to market FEC-enabled solutions that will deliver perfect quality streams while saving money and bandwidth for operators and content providers."

Alternative methods for ensuring stream quality are buffering data ahead of time, which causes frustrating delays and limits the user's ability to sample numerous streams or "channel surf," and Pro-MPEG FEC. Pro-MPEG, sometimes used for IPTV solutions, wastes large amounts of bandwidth and offers very limited protection of the transported stream.

Prior to ToughStream, developers wishing to incorporate FEC had to deeply understand how FEC works, create or adopt some suitable protocol and then spend months tuning to achieve the desired results. Often, such solutions were inflexible to the varying demands of different networks.

With ToughStream, developers are presented with a simple and familiar network socket architecture. ToughStream handles all of the complexities of FEC processing and data transport automatically. The sending application simply writes streaming packets to the socket and the receiving application simply reads streaming packets from the socket. Numerous parameters are run-time configurable, allowing for simple tuning of the optimal mix of loss protection, bandwidth usage, processing resources and quality.

The ToughStream Engine technology was designed to be simple for licensees to quickly integrate into a streaming solution, allowing developers to accelerate their time to market, reduce their development costs, and reduce their project risk and complexity. Because ToughStream incorporates DF Raptor, it offers the benefit of the most efficient and effective FEC available. No other solution can provide a similar combination of bandwidth efficiency and stream quality.

Digital Fountain also announced the availability of the DF ToughStream Evaluation Platform. Deployed as a hardware-based system placed inline in production or laboratory networks, it allows operators and equipment vendors to evaluate how a network will perform with the ToughStream Engine without having to write a single line of code. The system offers a simple web-based user interface that allows the operator to vary ToughStream configuration parameters and to measure resulting network and system performance.

Currently in broad commercial use for IPTV services offered in Japan, the DF Raptor FEC technology is incorporated in Sumitomo Electric Networks' StreamCruiser IP set-top boxes -- which are used by subscribers of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corporation Communications' OCN Theater video-on-demand services and others.

About DF Raptor

Digital Fountain's DF Raptor represents the culmination of years of research by the company's world-renowned scientists, Dr. Michael Luby and Dr. Amin Shokrollahi. DF Raptor is an erasure correction technology, capable of correcting "missing" or "lost" data. By recovering lost data packets without requiring retransmission from the sender, DF Raptor efficiently and effectively provides reliability in data networks.

DF Raptor is able to generate a potentially limitless amount of encoded data from any original set of source data, thereby supporting extremes of low or high network loss as needed for a particular application. Unlike conventional FEC codes where the encoding and decoding calculations increase at an accelerating rate as the size of the source data or amount of loss protection increases, the processing requirements for DF Raptor increase only linearly with the amount of source data, making it highly scalable. As a result, DF Raptor can be implemented as lightweight software-based solutions for a variety of multimedia streaming and data transfer applications.

About Digital Fountain

Based in Fremont, California, Digital Fountain develops and licenses advanced FEC (forward error correction) technology to enhance the quality of communications over data networks. Digital Fountain's patented DF Raptor FEC technology improves multimedia streaming quality, ensures timely delivery of data, and enables the creation and development of new communications services. DF Raptor is used today in a variety of enterprise, military, and consumer devices and applications, supporting both wired and wireless telecommunications networks. The company partners with some of the largest and most sophisticated companies, including global defense company Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) and Sumitomo Electric Networks, to strategically offer advanced communications to companies around the globe. For more information, visit Digital Fountain's Web site at www.digitalfountain.com.