Coral Consortium Releases New Interoperability Specifications And Grows Membership

The Coral Consortium...today announced that it has released a new draft of its interoperability specifications...

Fremont, CA, February 22, 2006 – The Coral Consortium (www.coral-interop.org), an industry-wide technology initiative whose goal is to deliver an open, voluntary standard for interoperability between digital rights management (DRM) technologies for consumer devices and services, today announced that it has released a new draft of its interoperability specifications. Coral also announced significant additions to its membership. New members include America Online, Inc., Cisco Systems, Comcast New Media Development, Inc., enikos Pty Ltd., Gibson Guitar Corporation, Irdeto Access BV, LG Electronics, Motorola, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc., SecureMedia Inc., and Verimatrix.

"Coral continues to grow and make significant strides in advancing the development of open standards technology aimed at eliminating the confusion that stems from incompatible content formats,” said Jack Lacy, president of The Coral Consortium. “This work is the result of unprecedented collaborative technical work and consensus among a broadly based and steadily growing group of key companies all involved in the creation, delivery, and future of digital content.”

The specifications, which are available under evaluation agreement from www.coral-interop.org, include an updated version of Coral’s core interoperability framework expanded to support a model for interoperable content usage across a domain of consumers’ devices. This release will allow device makers and service providers to give consumers the power to easily locate and play content on all of their devices, without having to grapple with technical details like different device DRMs and media formats. Coral expects to deliver a public release of a complete interoperability framework later this year.

About The Coral Consortium
Founded on October 4, 2004 as a cross-industry group to promote interoperability between DRM technologies used in the consumer media market, Coral Consortium's founding members are HP, Intertrust Technologies Corporation, Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. "Panasonic", Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Sony Corporation, and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. In addition to its founders, Coral Consortium also includes among its promoter members, IFPI and NBC Universal, Inc.

The Coral Consortium seeks to ensure interoperability so that today's digital music and video can be easily accessed and enjoyed, regardless of the service provider or the device. While recent innovations in digital media distribution provide consumers with new channels to acquire music and video, proprietary differences still exist in underlying DRM or content protection technology. At times, these technologies conflict and prevent consumers from playing content packaged and distributed using one DRM technology on a device that supports a different DRM technology. The Consortium's focus is a new technology layer that will allow existing DRM solutions to co-exist, thereby promoting content and devices that play well together.

For More Information Contact:
Leigh Anne Varney
Varney Business Communication
415.387.7250
la@varneybusiness.com

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Coral Consortium Corp.
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