Better HD video comes to the web

Recast Digital is promising high-definition and DVD-quality video delivered over the internet without the need for specialist software or workstation-class hardware.

The company claimed that its technology enables high-quality video to be delivered over the public internet, and that consumers require nothing more than a browser and Adobe's Flash plug-in to view the content.

Jonathan Toni, director at Recast Digital, suggested that the primary recipients for the technology would be content owners, such as advertising agencies or broadcasters, making it a potential rival to the BBC's hugely popular iPlayer service.

"We can cut content for people for a fee, so our primary business model is encoding for companies. For large broadcasters, we will consider licensing so they can encode content for themselves," he said.

Recast Digital's Flash-based RDV1 player senses the computer power and bandwidth available to the user, and adjusts the definition accordingly up to the 3Mbit/s required for full HD quality.

"We have re-engineered Flash using existing codecs so that it enables HD content very smoothly, even across the internet," Toni said. "However, if you're a user, as long as you have Flash 9 or above, it just works."