Electronics giant teams up with Square Enix

Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, and Japanese games company Square Enix will develop technology to deliver games, music, movies and other digital content to a wide range of consumer electronics devices, including mobile phones, car navigation systems and flat screen digital TVs, a Matsushita spokesman said this week.
Square Enix is the developer of the popular and long-running Final Fantasy series of video games.

The hardware will be based on further development of Matsushita's existing UniPhier single chip media processor, the spokesman said.
Panasonic announced various UniPhier-based products last year, such as a video camera and car navigation system.

The two companies will cooperate to make Square Enix's SEAD (Square Enix Application on Demand Engine) software work on UniPhier-based products.

The system will make it easier to develop and deliver the same content to multiple platforms with different capabilities, the spokesman said.

"I believe the collaboration with Square Enix to be the best alliance for the future as they not only own an attractive p ortfolio of digital content assets, but also have excellent technologies in 3D graphics and embedded software," said Dr. Susumu Koike, Matsushita's executive vice president for research, in a press statement.
"Square Enix aims to become an integrated digital content and service provider in the ubiquitous network era. Panasonic is the best partner for building a seamless content platform on digital consumer electronics," added Square Enix president, Yoichi Wada.

"We seek to distribute content for digital consumer electronics as well as game consoles. We believe this collaboration will enable our two companies to provide new and highly accessible forms of entertainment to our customers through an integrated hardware and content usage model."