Japanese Operator Orders Music Platform

Coding Technologies says that Japan's KDDI Corp. has selected MPEG-4 aacPlus for use in their new mobile music download service, EZ "Chaku-Uta Full." With service starting in November, KDDI will initially provide the service on handset models from Toshiba, Hitachi, Sanyo, and Casio. KDDI selected aacPlus, also known as HE AAC, to speed downloads, to reduce network costs, and to store more music on the handsets.

KDDI is launching EZ "Chaku-Uta Full" nationwide in Japan with approximately 10,000 tracks. Users can preview songs then purchase them for direct download to their mobile handset. To increase the size of their library, users can also move tracks to miniSD cards on enabled handsets. The first four handset models to ship will be Toshiba W21T, Hitachi W22H, Sanyo W22SA, and Casio W21CA.

"Building on the success of our EZ "Chaku-Uta(r)" ringtone business, we are moving to full song downloads as a defining service for our mobile customers," said Makoto Takahashi, Vice President and General Manager of the Content Division of KDDI Corporation. "With aacPlus, we give our customers faster downloads, higher-quality, and more songs on their handset, while we save money operating the network."

"KDDI is leading the way toward convergence," said David Frerichs, Vice President and U.S. General Manager of Coding Technologies. "By providing mobile phones with swappable storage, great headphones, flat-rate data, and direct access to all the music you want, they have suddenly made PC-centric devices obsolete for Internet multimedia. This action further accelerates the status of aacPlus as a common denominator codec across markets."

Posted to the site on 25th October 2004