Royal Phillips Electronics has announced that it is licensing Sony's Memory Stick software for use in its Nexperia-branded family of multimedia chips for televisions.

The Nexperia brand covers integrated circuits (ICs) for digital video, media processing, DVD+RW, and mobile phone products. However, the initial focus for the memory stick technology will be in televisions.

With this, consumers would be able to view images from still and video digital cameras, while listening to MP3 audio files, on their television sets, Philips said in a statement. They will also be able to capture still images from their television screens, compressing and storing them as JPEG images on the memory stick for use in other devices such as PDAs, the company said.

An official release informs that the company's hardware can support any memory card technology, but this is the first time it has a license to offer the software to make it easier to develop. It doesn't preclude using any other memory cards.

Phillips Electronics, is developing various products using memory cards, but its policy is that all products must accept all types of card. Philips Electronics has a home entertainment system and a DVD player on the market with memory card access, but is not yet developing televisions with their own memory slots.