Matsushita Electric Industrial and Square Enix held a press conference today in Tokyo to announce a new alliance, according to an Impress Watch report. The CEOs of both companies joined forces to discuss their plans to collaborate on a hardware/software platform that will ease multidevice content development and deliver a "seamless content environment" to consumers.

　　More specifically, the companies plan to incorporate Square Enix's middleware, the Square Enix Application on Demand Engine (SEAD Engine), into Matsushita's UniPhier, an existing platform for digital home electronics. Target devices include TVs, car navigation systems, video-enabled cell phones, and so on.

　　Matsushita's UniPhier platform is already used in some of the company's products, including LCD TVs and car navigation systems. It's a hardware product with built-in DRM and a scalable architecture. The company claims that drawing on the UniPhier's capabilities, rather than building from scratch, dramatically cuts development time for both software and hardware.

　　Square Enix's SEAD is a middleware product based on a product originally developed by Square Enix's Seattle subsidiary, UI Evolution. It's been designed to facilitate development of multiformat/multidevice content.

　　As for how each company stands to benefit from the deal, Matsushita sees clear advantages to facilitating content development that will drive sales of its home-entertainment appliances, while the additional revenue from sales of the jointly developed platform would pad the bottom line for Square Enix. The two companies plan to complete a prototype in the first half of 2006, and hope to bring a product to market by the end of 2007.