MP4SLS Private Limited 50 Tagore Lane, #05-06A, Singapore 787494

Lighting up the future of music

A Product White Paper

Author: Frankie TAN CEO MP4SLS Private Limited June 2011

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MP4SLS Private Limited 50 Tagore Lane, #05-06A, Singapore 787494

The future of music

The future of music is digital. In 2009, more than 27% of the recorded music industrys global revenues came from digital channels a market worth $4.2 billion up 12% on 2008. This represents 940% increase in value over the digital music market in 2004. Music fans can access and pay for music in diverse ways - from buying tracks or albums from download stores and using subscription services to using music services bundled with devices, buying mobile apps for music and listening to music through streaming services for free.

2004
Licensed music services

2009
400+ 11m + tracks

Less than 50 1m

Catalogue available Industrys digital revenue

% of industrys revenue from digital

US$20 million US$4.2 billion

Negligible 27%

The digital music entertainment industry is at another major inflection point in its short history. It is on the verge of a new chapter in the mobile digital music market; wireless music streaming is converging with consumer behavioral shifts1 to build music collections online where they can be accessed on a multitude of connected devices connected digital audio players, smart- and mobile-phones, net-books, tablets, computers, televisions, cars without the tedium of managing each and every file transfer by hand. Mobile cloud music services can be generally split into four categories: on-demand streaming, internet radio, locker services and music recommendation and discovery
1

Why bother storing music on an MP3 player when you can listen to millions of songs over any phone, computer, tablet, car, TV or any other device that is connected to the Internet; rather than buying songs for 99 cents and downloading them and managing them and moving them between your devices, you just log in from anything and your music is right there Eliot Van BusKirk, a blogger for Wired.

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MP4SLS Private Limited 50 Tagore Lane, #05-06A, Singapore 787494 services. As a business concept, they have their highest value proposition in convenience and improved portability of music services. Other key market drivers include growing smart-phone penetration, cross-platform usage, social networking, third party partnerships, such as, value-added services for carriers and involvement by Apple, Google, HP and Sony (bringing increased consumer education). According to ABI Research, global mobile music subscription revenues in 2011 will total $403.6 million. In 2016, the revenue base will amount to $7.3 billion, representing a CAGR of 78.5% for the period.
8,000 7,000 6,000 Africa

($ Millions)

5,000 4,000 3,000

Middle East
Latin America North America Asia-Pacific Eastern Europe Western Europe

2,000
1,000 0 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

In term of customers, the worldwide subscriber base count will reach 5.8 million by the end of 2011. In 2016, the number of subscribers will total 161 million, implying a CAGR of 94%.
180 160 140 120
(Millions)

Africa Middle East Latin America North America

100 80 60 40 20 0 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Asia-Pacific
Eastern Europe Western Europe

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MP4SLS Private Limited 50 Tagore Lane, #05-06A, Singapore 787494 Mobile cloud music services are a form of entertainment that competes with other forms of entertainment, so the value proposition must be high enough to justify the subscription fee. For genres in which good-quality audio is an integral part of the experience, audio bit-rates must be substantially higher and file size correspondingly larger. Mobile, however, is not an ideal medium to access such offerings. This is because although advancements in coding and transmission techniques have improved streaming media quality, current solutions and buffering techniques for mobile streaming have not been able to guarantee real-time delivery of good quality audio. For audio streams with real-time requirements, insufficient bandwidth causes data loss and associated artifacts; disturbing its real-time nature. Wireless and cellular network conditions in particular are affected by buildings, distance from base stations and network congestion, and as such, often exhibit unpredictable and fluctuating behavior. This inhibits delivery of acceptable streaming quality and high-fidelity2 entertainment experience of mobile music cloud services.

The ORAStream Solution (ORAStream)

The emergence of MPEG-4 Scalable to Lossless audio coding standard provided an opportunity to more effectively stream music over internet IP networks. The scalable to lossless audio format allows digital music to scale from low bit-rate to lossless quality audio over a wide range of intermediate bit rate representations. This diagram illustrates the underlying technology used in the ORAStream Platform.

The digital revolution valued convenience and compromised the sonic integrity of the music; people want to hear the details and emotion of the tracks they play. They want to be moved by their music Dr Dre for Beats.

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MP4SLS Private Limited 50 Tagore Lane, #05-06A, Singapore 787494 In the ORAStream server, scalable audio bit-stream in MPEG-4 SLS3 format generated by the scalable audio encoder is packetized into different layers before being streamed out. Based on network information, such as, available network bandwidth collected from a streaming client music player, the ORAStream server sends out (in real-time) corresponding bit-rate data by truncating unnecessary layers. In the receiving side, the streaming client player reconstructs the scalable audio bit-stream from the received data units and decodes the music on-the-fly (in real-time). The ORAStream Solution therefore automatically monitors and optimizes network bandwidth usage on a device-by-device basis; enhancing the most optimum audio quality resolution for each streaming music player to enrich streaming music entertainment experience. ORAStream makes the process of bandwidth optimization completely transparent to consumers; enabling mobile music cloud services to transmit live and ondemand digital music to large numbers of simultaneous music subscribers over Internet, wireless and cellular networks. The value propositions of ORAStream are best illustrated through the diagrams below.

MP3 / AAC / WMA / FLAC / APPLE Lossless Uninterrupted

listening experience

Non Network Adaptive Fix Rate Streaming Real Time Network Adaptive Streaming

Scalable Lossless
Music Quality Streaming*

*Dependent on network bandwidth condition

MPEG4-SLS (SLS) is an audio compression technology which extends MPEG-4 AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) from perceptually transparent playback to lossless (high quality) audio quality in a scalable fashion. Consumer applications for SLS include an ability to manage a music library that simultaneously supports lossless playback on high quality audio equipment in the home, as well as, playback on portable devices for on-the-go listening. It also works in the non-core mode where the AAC is not present

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MP4SLS Private Limited 50 Tagore Lane, #05-06A, Singapore 787494 In current streaming music platforms, music files associated with MP3, AAC, WMA and most other audio formats are encoded in fixed bit-rate profiles. Like solid ice-cubes, these audio profiles cannot adapt dynamically to varying network conditions. When network connectivity is reduced (network congestion, interference, environment factors), music streaming would be interrupted, thus resulting in Quality-of-Service (QoS) and Quality-ofEntertainment (QoE) experience issues. On the ORAStream Platform, MPEG-4 SLS audio files dynamically adapts to available bandwidth. As a result, music streaming is uninterrupted when network bandwidth narrows and scales to lossless, high fidelity quality when it broadens. This ameliorates QoS and QoE problems commonly associated and experienced with fixed bit-rate profiles in mobile music cloud services today. In a bid to deal with low and varying mobile network connectivity conditions, current streaming platforms employ audio encoding file formats at different bit-rates for tracks. The adaption of different music files to tune to different network conditions as well as digital music players increases media content management and delivery costs. This adds cost-driven pressure on business scalability as the size of a music services content library increases.
256kbs MP3/AAC
SLS

128kbs MP3/AAC 96kbs MP3/AAC 64kbs MP3/AAC 32kbs MP3/AAC

500 - 800 kbps

Optional

AAC Core / Coreless

Standardising music content to MPEG-4 SLS lowers cost of music streaming infrastructure
In using MPEG-4 SLS audio files, ORAStream delivers music to adapt dynamically to diverse network conditions and player devices from one single audio archival file. The resultant streaming media standardization achieves economies-of-scale efficiency in content delivery networks.
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MP4SLS Private Limited 50 Tagore Lane, #05-06A, Singapore 787494 By standardizing audio content on a single archival file, music services do away with multiple audio encodings and bit-rate quality music files. Furthermore, bulk storage and traffic from multiple music services could be aggregated on the ORAStream platform to increase total delivery commit rates, thus lowering average CDN per GB tariff rate for individual music services (than if each were to acquire CDN services on its individual bulk storage and/or traffic commit levels).

Conclusion
ORAStream is the first of its kind network adaptive audio technology that makes use of MPEG4 standards scalable to lossless audio. ORAStream enhances quality of service and quality of entertainment experience as well as reduces costs of mobile music delivery. These improvements are necessary; in fact, essential for mobile cloud music services because paid-for music offerings compete with other forms of entertainment, so the value proposition must be high enough to justify the subscription fee. We believe this will drive mainstream adoption. In Hebrew, ORA means Light. This, perhaps, is an apt description of a solution that lights up the future of music.

About MP4SLS Private Limited (Company): The company develops and delivers ORASTREAM to make mobile cloud music entertainment experience more enriching and satisfying. ORASTREAM is a patents4-pending, audio streaming server-decoder player system to transmit and receive MPEG4-SLS encoded audio. We build and market our ORASTREAM products, services and technologies to music services, media companies, broadcasters, wireless network carriers and mobile handset, consumer electronics and original equipment manufacturers who offer mobile cloud music entertainment products and services to consumers. ORASTREAM is targeted at the mobile cloud music entertainment chain from encoders for content creation to server-players to transmit and play streaming music throughout mobile cloud networks into portable media devices, mobile handsets, smart-phones, satellite radios, home media players, personal computers, note-books, net-books and tablets. We believe that ORASTREAM will hasten consumer acceptance and a must-have for delivery of mobile cloud music services.

Various patents on network adaptive audio streaming techniques have been filed by Exploit Technologies, the marketing and commercialization arm of A*STAR. The Company has exclusive rights to these patent applications.

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