Smart Internet CRC and the University of Wollongong create sweet music with enikos

commercial success

Based in Wollongong, Australia, enikos Pty Ltd, the first commercial spin-off to arise from Smart Internet Technology CRC research is a joint initiative between the inventors, the University of Wollongong (UOW), a founding Partner of the CRC, and the CRC. Formed in 2004 to supply software tools for next-generation multi-media applications based on the MPEG-21 standard, enikos today is a vehicle for commercialising Intellectual Property (IP) and software developed from research projects.
 

Darrell Williamson, CEO, Smart Internet CRC explains "The CRC's mission is to reduce the complexity of the internet and make content and functionality easily accessible for everyone. Smart Internet research in Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) standards and Smart Networks has combined over the last four years to address market needs and commercial opportunities in Media Services." "We recognised the substantial commercial opportunities in the multimedia delivery space were best pursued through a separate commercial entity, resulting in the birth of enikos. Moving forward, enikos will continue to focus on the commercial and standards related work, while Smart Internet CRC and UoW continue to research and generate innovative IP for enikos to capitalise on."

The mission of enikos is to produce 'middleware' solutions based around the MPEG-21 Multimedia framework. This is a new standard from the MPEG which provides solutions for the packaging of multimedia content and metadata.

Today, many elements exist to build an infrastructure for the delivery and consumption of multimedia content but before MPEG-21, there was no 'big picture' to describe how these elements relate to each other.

The basic architectural concept in MPEG-21 is the Digital ltem. This is a structured digital object, including a standard representation, identification, and metadata.The MPEG-21 framework incorporates DRM technologies making Digital Items ideal for the delivery of valuable multimedia content to consumers as well as for B2B applications.

Market Leading Solutions The market for music delivery on the Internet is expanding rapidly. 2004 already saw around $360m worth of downloads and projections for 2010 are as high as $14.7b downloads.The initial driver for this market was the availability of personal digital music players that can store and play from a large selection of music downloaded from the Internet. Users today however, are demanding 'rich' content to take advantage of the capabilities of advanced mobile devices and their ability to manipulate content such as cover art, video clips, lyrics, music scores, sampling and mixing etc. One of the challenges for the industry is the adoption of a universal open standard that enables non-proprietary delivery models and multiple channels to market. enikos has launched its first commercially developed software solutions, DlCreator and DlBrowser.At the same time, it closed a contract with one of the major global music companies and sold solutions to individuals and companies in Hong Kong, Norway, the UK and USA all interested in exploiting and deploying the MPEG-21 standard. Dr Ian Burnett, CTO enikos comments,"Since MPEG-21 is an ISO/IEC International standard, the market opportunity is global. The size of the opportunity however, is dependant on application spaces in which MPEG-21 is deployed. To date, the music industry has proven to be the keenest promoter and adopter. enikos possesses IP in the area of electronic music delivery and distribution using an MPEG-21 based model and is building partnerships with several major companies with regard to the deployment of solutions to the market. "Currently, enikos is the sole provider of tools which allow exploitation of the MPEG-21 standard in a user friendly environment suitable for both experts and non-experts. We also have solutions which allow Digital Item technology to be deployed on servers and databases."

The Full Package

Dr Burnett is currently also the Australian Head of Delegation to MPEG-21 and is Chair of the Multimedia Description Schemes subgroup at MPEG and with other enikos staff has taken significant roles as editors of parts of the MPEG-21 standard.