Ron Clifton, IDC. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

Satellite services company International Datacasting Corp. is partnering with Montreal's SENSIO Technologies Inc. to offer 3D digital and e-cinema products.

Ottawa-based IDC said it has signed a letter of intent to jointly develop and offer complete end-to-end integrated broadcast solutions for use in the two applications.

SENSIO will provide its expertise in 3D digital content encoding and decoding and IDC will add its broadband satellite distribution networking technology to the mix.

"This partnership is timely and we are delighted to be working with the SENSIO team and having their technology to add to our portfolio of application solutions," said IDC chief executive Ron Clifton in a statement. "Digital cinema networks are just starting to be deployed and affordable 3D cameras and digital projection technologies are now commercially available. SENSIO's 3D technology is leading-edge and our integrated solution has already been successfully evaluated and demonstrated by an independent third-party digital cinema customer."

The two companies plan to offer their integrated product for broadcasting live 3D sporting and cultural events, as well as for the distribution of movie files to the international digital and e-cinema market.

SENSIO's technology allows three-dimensional, high-definition video to be distributed over standard 2D infrastructure and then transforms it back into 3D video for direct digital projection with visually lossless compression. IDC's SuperFlex technology and Datacast XD content management and distribution software enables customers to distribute content through secure broadband satellite broadcasting networks using Internet protocol and the Digital Video Broadcasting industry standard.