~Links~

Send in your Banners!!

Don't got one? I can make one for you!!

Dreamcast Voice Over IP

• Make Long Distance calls  (See Below)

• Sega's DreamCall™ product, powered by InnoMedia's Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology, allows Sega gamers to use their Dreamcast gaming console to place Internet calls and speak with any other Dreamcall Sega gamer in the world for free, bypassing long distance toll charges. In addition, they can use the VoIP-enabled Dreamcast device to place calls to any wireline or wireless telephone in more than 200 countries through InnoSphere™, InnoMedia's global Internet telephony service network.

San Jose, Calif. — May 10, 2000 — InnoMedia™, Inc., a leading provider of Internet telephony products and services, today announced a partnership with Sega Enterprises, Ltd. that will revolutionize the gaming experience for millions of Sega gamers around the world. Sega will incorporate InnoMedia's Internet telephony capabilities into the Dreamcast™ game console. Sega, a pioneer in the network gaming arena, is the first company to allow gamers to speak with one another live while playing games over the Internet.

Sega's new DreamCall™ product, which is powered by InnoMedia's Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology, also allows Sega gamers to use their Dreamcast device to place Internet telephone calls and speak with any other DreamCall Sega gamer in the world for free, bypassing long distance toll charges. In addition, they can use the VoIP-enabled Dreamcast device to place calls to any wireline or wireless telephone in more than 200 countries through InnoSphere™, InnoMedia's global Internet telephony service network. InnoSphere rates are as little as 2 cents per minute to Hong Kong; 5 cents per minute to the USA or the UK; and 9 cents per minute to Japan, Australia, Canada and most of Europe.

"Sega is proud of its track record in offering technical advances that enhance the gaming experience. Voice-over-IP is the latest innovation that further extends our leadership position in Internet gaming," said Mr. Hideki Sato, corporate senior vice president for Sega Enterprises, Ltd. "InnoMedia was the ideal company to partner with on this next-generation game console capability. In addition to its superior technologies, InnoMedia provides an end-to-end VoIP platform which ensures a managed signal path and delivers the highest voice quality."

"Internet gamers already spend a lot of time with online text chatting, so voice-over-IP provides an important way to really enhance the online gaming experience," said Joseph Gagan, senior analyst with The Yankee Group. "The Sega/InnoMedia partnership brings together leading names in the gaming and IP telephony worlds and will undoubtedly create quite a stir in the industry."

Dr. Nan-Sheng Lin, president and co-founder of InnoMedia, Inc. said, "We are excited that our technology will be available to every Sega Dreamcast user. This partnership dramatically expands our reach, enabling us to serve millions of additional users around the world. We are pleased to know that the many recent investments and upgrades we've made to our network infrastructure will support this new class of voice-over-IP user."

InnoMedia provides its Internet telephony technologies to partners like Sega through its "Powered by InnoMedia" program, in licensing, OEM and private labeling agreements. InnoMedia's mission is to offer the best quality and value in Internet telephony solutions to partners and customers, enabling a variety of innovative products and services to reach new categories of users.

Crisp, Clear Voice Quality
Sega gamers who take advantage of InnoMedia's VoIP technologies will enjoy outstanding digital voice quality. InnoMedia has invested years of engineering work in packet recovery, echo cancellation, and other technologies that create superior signal quality in IP telephony applications. Gamers will be spared the stuttering voice experience of less robust IP telephony solutions.

Availability
Sega will provide its DreamCall software to users in Japan in this summer. The Internet telephony service will subsequently be offered to Dreamcast users worldwide, including those in the United States and Europe.

About Voice-over-IP (VoIP)
In VoIP systems, analog voice signals are digitized and transmitted as a stream of packets over a digital data network. IP networks allow each packet to independently find the most efficient path to the intended destination, thereby best using network resources at any given instant. The packets associated with a single source may thus take many different paths to the destination in traversing the network, arriving with different end-to-end delays, arriving out of sequence, or possibly not arriving at all. At the destination, however, the packets are re-assembled and converted back into the original voice signal. VoIP technology insures proper reconstruction of the voice signals, compensating for echoes made audible due to the end-to-end delay, for jitter, and for dropped packets.