Boulder, CO - April 8, 2000 -- Pluto Technologies is pleased to announce the roll-out of a new HDTV software application, called ZSPACE, making work with compressed HD images on SGI workstations and movement of compressed HD files over local and wide area networks, a reality. Developed by Pluto's Japanese partner Imagica Corporation in conjunction with Sony Corporation, these new capabilities allow open platform access to previously closed compressed HDTV image formats and can be seen for the first time at NAB 2000.

All commonly used HDTV VTR's employ compression as the raw uncompressed data rates are too high to be cost effective. Both Sony and Panasonic have effectively demonstrated that they can compress HDTV from 7 to 10 times with no visible artifacts due to "redundancy" in picture information, as well as with improvements in compression techniques. Until now, the efficiencies afforded by compression have been mostly limited to tape decks and servers. With the addition of HDCAM software codecs (compression/decompression) to Imagica's ZSPACE application, high definition images can now be pulled from and written to Pluto's HyperSPACE HDTV servers with the same ease users have enjoyed at standard definition.

ZSPACE allows any user of any SGI graphics or image processing software to read and write from single frames to any length clip of HD media exactly as they do with standard definition. Even the picture sizes are roughly the same, allowing much more efficient use of network bandwidth and server storage with similar performance to uncompressed standard definition material. All ZSPACE transfers leverage the popular SGI Image Format Library to accommodate virtually every professional video image format in use today. Pluto anticipates many visits from excited post-production customers who will take advantage of these new capabilities.

"This is a superior tool that GTN can take immediate advantage of," stated Doug Cheek, President/CEO of GTN Productions in Oak Park, Michigan and dedicated Pluto customer. "ZSPACE is one of the tools we look forward to discovering more about at NAB. If it delivers on it's promise, it will further enhance the value, versatility and capability of GTN's cache of Pluto servers."

Pluto Technologies International Inc. based in Boulder, CO, designs and develops computer based video storage and networking solutions for post production, broadcast and other high bandwidth industries. Detailed information about Pluto products and the companies highly qualified management and engineering staff can be found on its World Wide Web site at http://www.plutotech.com.