"Experience has shown us that as broadband adoption has increased, so have consumers' appetites for ways to use that extra bandwidth. IPTV will test those limits," said Rod Tiede, CEO of Broadcast International. "Right now, most video compression solutions are not up to the challenge of dealing with the avalanche of video content that will accompany the emergence of IPTV, and certainly not with anything approaching HD quality. At best, most offer a 25 percent reduction in bandwidth, with compromised picture quality, which is nowhere near that required for IPTV."
Tiede believes that a compression system that offers a 90% reduction in bandwidth consumption is necessary. "In order for IPTV to live up to its promise, the user experience must be at least as good as that delivered by traditional broadcast media; and in fact, it should exceed it. But the existing infrastructure is just not up to that standard without a major change in video compression technology," he said.
Broadcast International is pushing its CodecSys system, which currently claims to offer an 80% reduction. It achieves this as it continuously evaluates and optimizes audio and video streams through the best attributes, capabilities and settings of multiple codecs for sections of videos. The technology works at a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis as the content is converted to digital data for transmission. Traditionally, a stream of video uses just one codec from start to finish. CodecSys however, evaluates each frame of video and determines which codec is best for that particular frame or a group of frames.
Source:
Press Release
Written by: James Delahunty @ 25 Sep 2007 18:47
