You’ll be forgiven for not noticing at CES last week that SiBeam made considerable headway with its chipsets aimed at delivering high speed WirelessHD. It showed existing Panasonic designs and added US TV maker Vizio to its customer base (see separate story in this issue). It was almost exactly a year ago to the day that the very first devices with WirelessHD were put on show by LG, and Panasonic previewed a product in the Summer, bringing WirelessHD closer and closer to common use by consumers.
At the same time Best Buy has stood up and taken an unspecified investment in SiBeam. The last time SiBeam revealed a funding amount was when it took $40 million in April 2008 from New Enterprise Associates Foundation Capital and US Venture Partners.
A further unspecified investment came in December 2008 from Panasonic and Samsung and this investment, just over a year later is the latest. Investment rounds tends to get bigger not smaller, so the Best Buy deal is likely to be in the tens of millions. In addition to its retail stores Best Buy manufactures its own brands of technology products, including the Insignia, Rocketfish, Dynex, Init and Geek Squad brands. Best Buy recently joined the WirelessHD Consortium, and launched its Rocketfish WirelessHD Adapters.
WirelessHD products have already shown up in Panasonic, LG, Funai and Toshiba products and in September they had their first outing in Europe at the IFA in Berlin, where Philips signed up to the consortium and promised devices based on SiBeam chips and last year Sony announced its intention to back away from WHDI and its main technology provider, Amimon, and said it would embrace WirelessHD.
In October SiBeam gave its second generation chips their first outing and they were on show once again at CES making a big showing, aware we are sure that the WiGig Alliance is its clearest competition backed by Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, Marvell and Mediatek.
In keeping with one of the big themes of CES, SiBeam said that WirelessHD Next Generation could easily carry 3D HD video streams, that it already supports the HDCP 2.0 data protection standard and said it would support data rates in excess of 10 Gbps.
Panasonic has developed a WirelessHD Authorized Self Test House. It now has an internal facility where it will be able to test WirelessHD products for protocol compliance and interoperability in early 2010.
SiBeam says that products with the new technology will be backward compatible to existing WirelessHD products.
The new WirelessHD specification claims: A data rate between 10 ‘ 28 Gbps, which will support 4K (4 times 1080p) and Deep Color (with more bits used on each pixel) as well as 3D over WirelessHD and will also offer sync’n go file transfers at 1 Gbps for portable and fixed devices.
Supposedly this means you can put a low power chip in a mobile device and copy HD video files to it for viewing on the move ‘ at that speed it would only take a few seconds to transfer an hour’s video (if it had already been downscaled) or at worst a few minutes.