On Wednesday, Sony, Samsung and several other major electronics producers announced their coming together for supporting a new technology that, once implemented, would send wireless high-definition video signals from a set-top box to a series of screens which can be located anywhere in the house.

Sony Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. will work alongside Motorola Inc., Hitachi Ltd. and Sharp Corp. for producing a new industry standard around the new technology (WHDI) provided by Amimon Ltd. of Israel.

According to Noam Geri, co-founder of Amimon, with WHDI, users will be able to access any home-based source (a set-top box in one’s living room or a PlayStation or a DVD player in one’s bedroom) through the TV.

Noam Geri expects new generations of TVs packing Amimon chips to be commercialized as soon as next year, for prices about 100$ higher than non-wireless units.

An alternative to WHDI could consist in ultra-wideband, or UWB. Although it needs less compression than Wi-Fi does, it has a much shorter range; its best use applies to in-room networking. The problem with Wi-Fi is that, as the chips found on both ends of the link must first compress and then decompress the image, a delay in transmission occurs.

Kurt Scherf, an analyst at Parks Associates, said that although wireless video technologies have been widely discussed for many years, nothing remarkable has been done yet. However, he did add that WHDI's range could lead to something more than the simple replacement of cables.