Digital Fountain Launches Licensing Program to Tap New Markets.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 5, 2003

Digital Fountain

Embedded Fountain Technology Enables Licensees to Build High Speed,

Reliable Products for Notoriously Unreliable Wireless Networks

Digital Fountain, provider of the fastest, most predictable global data-delivery solutions, today announced the launch of an innovative new licensing program. By licensing its Embedded Fountain Technology to a broad range of partners, Digital Fountain is extending its solution into applications, such as automobile data broadcasting, satellite content delivery, wireless Internet access and live video for businesses, military and consumers.

"Embedded Fountain Core Technology is an ideal delivery solution for wireless data networks, which are inherently unreliable. This is a speed and efficiency breakthrough for wireless communications," said Cliff Meltzer, CEO of Digital Fountain. "We are already establishing a licensing presence across many important sectors and are experiencing vibrant demand to create a broader market for embedding Digital Fountain technology."

Embedded Fountain Core Technology

The first available component of the Embedded Fountain Technology family is the Embedded Fountain Core Technology. Embedded Fountain Core Technology makes it possible for partners to embed the core Digital Fountain Meta-Content(TM) processes into their communications applications. For wireless applications, Embedded Fountain Core Technology offers a powerful and much more efficient alternative to traditional delivery protocols like TCP/IP as well as conventional forward error correction (FEC) and repetitive carousel-based transmission systems. Traditional protocols apply a "brute-force" approach to delivering all packets and suffer from frequent random and burst losses, which compromise speed and waste valuable network capacity. On the other hand, with Meta-Content, the loss of individual packets is of little consequence. The loss of any particular Meta-Content packet or set of packets does not impact the reliability of transmission and significantly, it has negligible impact on throughput.

Markets For Embedded Fountain Core Technology

Digital Fountain's Embedded Fountain Core Technology is extending its solution into a variety of applications. Potential untapped market opportunities include: car navigation, digital radio, military systems, and a broad range of wireless devices. Other general application categories include High-Speed Wide Area Storage Networks, Peer-to-Peer Systems and Disk Storage Systems. For example:

-- Wireless Internet access: Whereas traditional networking

technologies are ill-suited to wireless delivery, Digital

Fountain's Meta-Content technologies can reliably deliver data

and perfect quality streams over imperfect wireless networks

and can be embedded into a wide range of applications built on

virtually any physical or networking infrastructure.

-- Automobile data broadcasting: A key challenge in broadcasting

data to automobiles over satellite networks is providing

reliable communications to an unlimited number of cars in the

face of changing landscapes, random periods of

inaccessibility, and constant interruptions. In this

challenging scenario, Digital Fountain's Meta-Content is the

only solution that can deliver fresh data quickly and

predictably on the order of ten times faster than conventional

FEC and Carousel technology.

-- Live Streaming: The Embedded Fountain Core Technology allows

perfect quality transmission of video or other streaming data 

over unreliable networks such as wireless or commodity

internet. It allows service providers to deploy high quality

streaming services without expensive network upgrades. The

Embedded Fountain Core Technology works with all kinds of

video codecs and compression schemes, including MPEG1, MPEG2,

and MPEG4, at bit rates ranging from 50 Kbps to 15 Mbps.

Digital Fountain's Licensing Program

The new licensing program, which complements the existing Transporter Fountain product family, allows Digital Fountain to pursue innovative partner relationships that can push the technology in myriad new directions. Digital Fountain currently offers two flexible licensing packages as part of its program:

-- The Development Package is for companies who develop hardware,

software or integrated circuits for use in end-user products.

The Development Package allows companies to develop, test and

demonstrate products that include the Embedded Fountain Core

Technology.

-- The Product Package is for companies who produce and sell

end-user products that include the Embedded Fountain Core

Technology. The Product Package allows for the sale and

distribution of products that incorporate the Embedded

Fountain Core Technology.

Digital Fountain has already licensed the Embedded Fountain Core Technology to a host of world-class organizations including Sumitomo Electric Networks.

About Digital Fountain

Digital Fountain provides the fastest, most predictable global data-delivery solutions. The company's technology allows customers to realize dramatically increased data transfer speeds and predictable data delivery times resulting in significant savings in both time and expenditures. Digital Fountain's products are based on the company's patented Meta-Content technology, a networking innovation that dramatically simplifies the processes required to completely and perfectly deliver data over any network, regardless of impairments like packet loss and delay. Industry leaders in media, technology, oil & gas, retail and government agencies are currently using digital Fountain products. For more information call 510/284-1400, email [e-mail] or visit www.digitalfountain.com.