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24th September 2003

US & ASIA : SK Telecom and Coding Technologies announced that SK Telcom is adopting aacPlus and plans to deploy the codec (Coder – Decoder) into its 3G content service offerings. SK Telecom already provides Music On Demand (MOD) and Video On Demand (VOD) to over 1 million 3G subscribers in Korea. With the addition of MPEG-4 aacPlus, download costs for subscribers and operating costs for SK Telecom will go down significantly.

The value of aacPlus has been demonstrated by multiple 3rd party tests. In careful double-blind listening tests conducted by Digital Radio Mondiale, MPEG, and the European Broadcasting Union, aacPlus outperformed all other codecs in the competition. Above is the results graph from the European Broadcasting Union testing at 48Kbps stereo.

aacPlus, and its core technology SBR, are already widely adopted for digital broadcasting in Europe, North America, and Asia. The announcement by SK Telcom and Coding Technologies marks the first commercial deployment of MPEG-4 aacPlus into the mobile space. SK Telecom decided to move ahead with aacPlus based on MPEG standardisation along with the significant cost savings and increased audio quality that aacPlus makes available to the consumer.

“As the top provider of 3G mobile services for quite some time, we have learned to always keep our customer’s needs first,” said WonHee Sull, Vice President/Platform R&D Centre of SK Telecom. “Now that we are using aacPlus, the world’s most efficient audio codec, we can provide our subscribers with even better service and cost savings.”

“SK Telecom has been leading the globe in both wired and wireless broadband content services,” said David Frerichs, VP and US General Manager of Coding Technologies. “Their adoption of aacPlus helps keep them at the cutting edge of price, performance and features.”

Handsets including aacPlus support are already in development with the first units shipping concurrent with the updated service rollout. This licensing deal was done in conjunction with Coding Technologies marketing partner Ezuz Japan K.K.

About MPEG-4 aacPlus
MPEG-4 aacPlus is the combination of MPEG AAC and Coding Technologies’ SBR (Spectral Band Replication) technology. SBR is a unique bandwidth extension technique, which enables audio codecs to deliver the same quality at half the bit rate. SBR is a backward and forward compatible method to enhance the efficiency of any audio codec. As a result, aacPlus delivers streaming and downloadable 5.1 multichannel audio at 128 Kbps, CD-quality stereo at 48 Kbps, excellent quality stereo at 32 Kbps, and excellent quality for mixed content down to 16 Kbps mono and below. This level of efficiency fundamentally enables new applications in the markets of mobile and digital broadcast.