Schools in Taiwan will soon use embedded Linux based systems to provide continuing education courses to teachers through inexpensive video-on-demand (VoD) devices. Additionally, by Q3 2004, some 100,000 educational VoD units are expected to roll out for use by Taiwanese students.

(Click for larger view of MediaReady 4000)

The devices will be manufactured by hardware designer and manufacturer Lung Hwa Electronics, and will run the “MediaReady” operating system licensed from Video Without Boundaries (VWB). Except for the lack of a DVD drive, the Lung Hwa “MediaReady 400” devices will resemble the “MediaReady 4000” devices announced earlier by VWB.

According to VWB, the devices will ship with a library of courses encoded in the MPEG4 format, and will automatically download new courses over the Internet. They will connect to “any television,” and offer email, web surfing, and MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MPEG-4/MP3 playback.

Peter Pai, Chairman and CEO of Lung Hwa Electronics, said, “This is an exciting deployment that demonstrates the increasing value and viability of Internet-based VoD and one-way video distribution using next-generation hardware.”

 
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