Electronics firms back wireless HD method

Sony, Samsung and other consumer-electronics heavyweights are uniting to support a technology that could send high-definition video signals wirelessly from a single set-top box to screens around the home.

The consortium announced Wednesday is an important development in the race to create the definitive way to replace tangles of video cables, but doesn’t end it – Sony and Samsung also support a competing technology.

In the new consortium, Sony Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co., along with Motorola Inc., Sharp Corp. and Hitachi Ltd., will develop an industry standard around technology from Amimon Ltd. of Israel called WHDI, for wireless home digital interface.

“If you have a TV in the home, that TV will be able to access any source in the home, whether it’s a set-top box in the living room or the PlayStation in the bedroom or a DVD player in another bedroom. That’s the message of WHDI,” said Amimon co-founder Noam Geri.

Amimon is already selling chips that fulfill part of that promise, but the creation of a broad industry group makes it more likely that WHDI-enabled devices from different manufacturers will work together.

Geri expects TVs with Amimon’s chips to reach stores next year, costing about $100 more than equivalent, non-wireless TVs.

Wireless streaming of high-definition video is a relatively tricky engineering problem that many companies are trying to tackle. It can be done with the fastest versions of Wi-Fi, a technology already in many homes, but that requires “compression,” or reduction of the data rate, with degraded picture quality. There’s also a delay in transmission as chips on both ends of the link work to compress, then decompress, the image.

That’s prompted much research into faster radio technologies that require less compression. A leading contender is WirelessHD, centered on technology from SiBEAM Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. It uses an open portion of the radio band, at 60 gigahertz, for ultrafast transmission of uncompressed video, but it could be years away from commercialization. Its range is limited, so it would be used for in-room links rather than whole-house networking, like WHDI.

Sony is part of the WirelessHD group as well and is supporting WHDI to have “wider options,” the company said in a statement.

Samsung, though, views WHDI as a stopgap technology until the higher-picture-quality WirelessHD takes over. JaeMoon Jo, Samsung’s vice president of TV research, said the company believed WirelessHD will be the “ultimate solution in the long run.”

Still another contending wireless technology is ultra- wideband, or UWB. It requires less compression than Wi-Fi, but its range is more limited, generally to in-room networking. Monster Cable Products Inc. plans to introduce a wireless video kit using UWB.