Dutch Philips Electronics NV said on Monday it planned to expand cooperation with U.S. network computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc on MPEG-4 data compression technology.

MPEG-4 technology, the successor to MPEG-2, is a standard to shrink the size of multimedia files so that interactive video services can be transmitted more quickly to computers, mobile devices and television set-top boxes. The two companies have signed a non-binding agreement to share technology that will make it easier to swap broadband media such as video or film between a wider range of their products.

The firms have already demonstrated how MPEG-4 content, encoded by Philips' WebCine Encoder, can be transferred to a Sun Enterprise server and then replayed over the network to a variety of clients, it added. Philips is Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics and lighting and number two in semiconductors. Sun Microsystems is number one in the U.S. market for powerful server computers which link networks.