By ONG BOON KIAT

AS Singapore embarks on its new initiative to forge future multimedia content and applications, a home- grown technology could add to the push - by making it easy to distribute movies and other multimedia content to the growing multitudes of viewing devices, ranging from mobile phones to Web-connected laptops to TVs.

Called Scalable Multimedia Platform (SMP), this novel technology made its public debut at the CommunicAsia tradeshow last week.

Developed by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), it solves a growing bugbear of content developers, broadcasters and service providers alike - the rising costs and complexities of managing the myriad of video files needed to cater to the growing viewing options that consumers have today.

'Today, if a service provider wants to deliver video to a HDTV (High-Definition TV), it needs a high-definition video file. If it wants to deliver to the mobile phone, it needs to separately encode another set of video files that are of mobile quality. For a provider, it is going to have to manage so many different video files in order to cater to its customers,' Peter Tay, assistant vice-president for science and engineering commercialisation, Exploit Technologies, told BizIT at the A*Star booth.

Exploit is A*Star's marketing and commercialisation unit.

He explained that with SMP, only one set of specially-encoded files will now be needed. That's because the new A*Star technology will automatically translate this set of files into streams of different quality and viewing sizes when they are required.

SMP is among the world's first scalable multimedia platforms, he said. Doing away with multiple databases of content means service providers can save big on storage, management and bandwidth costs, he added.

SMP mirrors another A*Star invention unveiled in March this year, known as MPEG-4 SLS (Scalable to Lossless Standard), which does to audio content what SMP can do for video. MPEG-4 SLS is now supported by its new sibling.

It is based on industry- standard file formats. Importantly, it works with a de facto video standard found in the majority of mobile phones around the world, known as H.264.

It caters to a broad array of applications, like in- home entertainment, broadcast, video conferencing and even video-surveillance.

Mr Tay believes SMP will be a boon for media firms here, and dovetails the Republic's new initiative to become a hotbed for next-generation multimedia content and applications. This initiative, dubbed FutureTV, was announced by the Media Development Authority (MDA) last week.

An event held earlier this month to unveil SMP to industry players has already drawn enthusiastic responses, and Mr Tay is confident this technology can benefit a wide range of media companies, developers and those in the broadcast and content distribution market in future.

'The market is huge. The technologies and bandwidth are evolving to a stage right now where, if you look at the capabilities of SMP, it is going to enable new players to come out and challenge the incumbents.'

This article was first published in The Business Times.