Dolby Labs this week said that it has negotiated an agreement to buy Sweden’s Coding Technologies, which has carved out a reputation as the leading supplier of audio compression technologies for mobile, digital broadcast, and Internet markets. The purchase price is $250 million net of the cash than Coding Technologies holds.
Coding Technologies had begun to occupy a lot of the space that a company like Dolby would expect want in the digital media space, with its technology included in many standard digital media format types including the audio for the DVD Forum products, 3GPP and 3GPP2 mobile standards, MPEG and DVB audio and the Digital Radio Mondiale and DAB+ digital radio standards.
Coding Technologies was originally a Swedish company but has merged with a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and is also partly based there. Its customers include, O2, Nokia, RealNetworks, SK Telecom, Thomson, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, and XM Satellite Radio to name but a few.
It offers a High Efficiency version of the AAC audio codec called alternatively aacPlus or HE AAC, which uses Spectral Band Replication, a bandwidth extension technique, which enables audio codecs to deliver the same quality at half the bit rate.
A handful of minority interests are outside the deal, but under Swedish law there is a process for mandating the purchase of these shares in the near term.
‘Dolby is committed to and focused on delivering innovative entertainment technology solutions to our customers and licensees. By adding Coding Technologies’ expertise and high-efficiency audio compression to our portfolio of technologies and services, we will be better positioned to support our customers as they continue to move into more bandwidth-constrained delivery methods such as mobile networks and the Internet,’ said Dolby CEO Bill Jasper,