Electric Switch Ltd of London has been set up as a bureau to provide a video compression service. It will transfer existing video tape to CD-ROM, Exabyte Corp tape or 4mm Digital Audio Tape. Electric Switch’s parent companies Electric Image and Portman Leisure teamed with Iterated Systems Ltd of Atlanta, Georgia, six months ago to start setting up the UK facility. The anticipated current target market is in the areas of television media as an archiving service, for example, or for companies that want to offer more professional presentations. Iterated Systems will provide MPEG and fractal technology. Iterated Systems has also formed a joint venture with IBM Corp to develop real time fractal compression. Charges for software video encoding start at UKP500 a session for set up and a single copy on data tape or CD-ROM, with additional programming and grading costing UKP150 per hour.
