Digital Fountain Receives Patent for Groundbreaking 'Meta-Content' Technology; Unique Technology Promises to Change the Way Data is Distributed.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 4, 2002

Digital Fountain received U.S. patent number 6,307,487 for its unique Meta-Content(TM) technology that changes the fundamental assumptions associated with transporting large amounts of digital data over networks. Digital Fountain co-founder and chief technology officer Dr. Michael Luby discovered a method of encoding data into a series of equations sent in packets to deliver the data with unprecedented efficiency and reliability. Meta-Content technology has been incorporated in specialized servers that let enterprises and service providers reliably transport mission-critical data and rich media files to one recipient or one million recipients. Traditional methods of content delivery sacrifice time and bandwidth to ensure exact delivery of data and rich media. Digital Fountain's approach guarantees that data is transported without any of the usual concerns for loss, delay or misdelivery, offering vast improvements in network throughput and server capacity.

Many businesses need to distribute data and media quickly and cost-effectively but find that current Internet technology sacrifices speed for reliability, bogging down when it comes to handling large files or large concurrent audiences. With Meta-Content technology, total reliability is retained and speed is greatly increased, particularly when applied to enterprise data distribution, software and game downloads, and on-demand audio or video to TV-scale audiences. With Meta-Content, individual users can receive content whenever they request it, with no increase in server load for each additional user.

How It Works

Dr. Luby's invention -- called "Luby Transform Codes" -- results in a breakthrough distribution scheme that is truly a "digital fountain." Like drops of water from a fountain, all data packets created by the Luby Transform are of equal value. To amass a quantity of water one needs enough drops, but "which" drops are of no consequence. Similarly with Meta-Content, one only need to collect enough packets, the specific packets and order of reception is of no consequence. This dramatically simplifies data transmission because individual packet loss or delay need never result in retransmissions. Meta-Content technology is the result of twenty plus years of research in theoretical computer science and coding theory on the part of Dr. Luby.

"Traditional IP networking technologies have inherent shortcomings when it comes to large files, large audiences and long-haul distribution and it is orders of magnitude more difficult when any of those factors are combined." said Luby. "These standard TCP-based technologies were primarily designed to send short messages over a network connection with little or no delay, but that just isn't reality. Meta-Content technology solves a problem that has been perceived as nearly intractable and is recognized as the most efficient data-distribution technique existing today."

One of the alternative solutions used to address network imperfections employs "block codes," which divide up content into chunks, with a fixed amount of redundancy added into each chunk. Ironically it's an unreliable solution because if the amount of lost packets is larger than the amount of redundancy, recovery of the file becomes impossible. By comparison, Luby Transform codes overcome the need for redundancy by encoding entire files, no matter how large, in such a way that each packet contains a sample of information about the entire file, instead of merely being an independent unit in a sequence, as with ordinary packets.

Meta-Content packets are completely interchangeable. Any group of packets equivalent to 105 percent of the original file is sufficient to recover the entire original. Because the algorithm used in the Luby Transform codes is highly efficient, Meta-Content can be generated, delivered and decoded with unprecedented speed. As a result:

-- Packet loss, transfer interruptions and network delay are all irrelevant,
thus allowing for vastly increased scalability.

-- Totally reliable delivery of content is guaranteed regardless of congestion
or concurrent demand, and at greatly reduced cost.

-- End users enjoy a hassle-free experience.

"Luby-Transform codes are the only known class of codes that are capable of adapting themselves to rapidly changing channel conditions," says Ruediger Urbanke, a professor at the Communications Department of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland. "They represent a very exciting development in coding theory and networking."

About Digital Fountain

Digital Fountain is the leading innovator in delivering massive, mission-critical data and media rich files to any number of receivers with its patent-pending Meta-Content(TM) technology. The family of Fountain Servers(TM) includes Download Fountain(TM), used for delivering high-demand rich content such as application upgrades, anti-virus files, or music and movie downloads and Streaming Fountain(TM), used for streaming on-demand rich media such as video on demand for Internet entertainment, corporate communications, and eLearning. Fountain Servers are unlike any other server technology in that they generate Meta-Content equations that mathematically represent the content, from which an unlimited number of users can reconstruct a perfect copy of the original content. This enables Content Owners, Service Providers, and Enterprises to build new business models for content delivery, since the cost for delivering rich media can be fixed and independent of audience size.

Fountain Server, Streaming Fountain, Download Fountain, Meta-Content and the Digital Fountain logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Digital Fountain, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.