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Quick Jump Menu to this Issue’s Articles April 28th, 2004 Overview It’s Live, No, it’s FTTP – On-Demand NAB – From a Telco Perspective SoapCity – Online, at Digital Hollywood and, now, at IP Video @ Supercomm
NAB – From a Telco Perspective
by Peter Lowten ([email protected])
April 28th, 2004 Issue
[Editor’s Note: You will be able to meet Peter in person at the IP Video @ Supercomm event]
NAB – a Show for All?
One of the great opportunities at these gatherings is the opportunity to grab magazines and periodicals from (semi) related industries that one would never think about in the day to day pursuance of Viodi’s business. But, if you think about it, publications as diverse as ‘Technology for Worship’ and ‘Xtreme Video’ actually illustrate the diversity of the opportunities offered Independent Telcos in reaching their local communities – everything from local churches’ events to the soap-box derby. They also contain perspectives, contacts and success stories very pertinent to our readers’ daily business.
This leads to an answer to the question “why should I be interested in what goes on at a “Broadcaster’s Show’?” I started to elucidate (OK, I’m old and English, so I use unusual vocabulary!) this in my International Broadcaster’s Convention (IBC) review for Viodi. These exhibitions – through exposing advances in technology, and in forums on standards, business practices and services – point some clear paths to the changes and new directions in video and data delivery, usage and interactions that affect us all. I used the word data because much of the discussion now centers round everything (audio, video and all types of information) being digits – not a new concept but now fully embraced in standards bodies and new product introductions. I hope to point out some of the ground swells of thinking.
WhataData?
Before getting to the latest advances in compressed audio and video, IP video, and amazing movie/web/still/camera/MP3/portable-hard-drive/ products, significant activity centered around metadata. In the jargon this is all the information about the essence – what we used to know as program content! – stored with and generated by and for the use of such content. Metadata rears its ugly head in diverse areas including (but by no means limited to!) Digital Rights Management (DRM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and Grandma uploading video of the grandkids latest visit for all the family to view.
I was honoured to be asked to speak at a round-table initiated by the Global Society for Asset Management (G-SAM), www.g-sam.org . This group has come a long way in providing the stimulus and open forums to impel vendors and users to consider the impact of handling the content chain. From content producers with rights management issues to content deliverers trying to find ‘that’ special picture for a local news insert, all need to know what and where their material is, and how and who can watch it. Without industry agreement, standards and knowledge transfer, there will be much ‘sturm und drang’ over DRM and DAM!
Talking about finding stuff in an archive (which we sort of were above) little things at these shows make you think! Most searches, using Google or a $300,000 specialized database, rely on typing some sort of descriptor and then searching through the million possible matches – the better the descriptor the better the search pattern. One technology displayed at NAB was a method of locating music by humming it – very useful if you have 10,000 tunes on your iPod! A joke? no – new ways for users to locate specific content that are intuitive will broaden the use of interactive data – video, audio, stills, email – leading to new personalized services. By the way my humming found two responses, a Mozart Concerto and a 70’s rock ballad. I had of course been trying to find the Mozart…..
Practical Stuff
Ok, given the above introduction, what was NAB saying?
HDTV is ‘just an ordinary part of the video industry’. A wide range of new low end HDTV products – amplifiers, test and measurement gear, monitors etc etc – are available. This says that smaller companies are now into HDTV and need cheaper products – hence the marketplace is driving innovation and cost reduction. As proof I saw the DG2L, http://www.dg2l.com, HDTV MPEG4/IP set-top. It seems to be too good to be true at a price in quantity of under the magic $100, but it certainly shook the show!
As an aside I also reviewed Scientific Atlanta’s ( http://www.sciatl.com ) new HD STB with built-in HD DVR – availability September I heard. One of the interesting things it does is to communicate over the in house cable wiring to control up to 3 more STBs and playout up to 3 simultaneous streams of HD. Imagine such a product that could communicate with a device outside the home over an IP network. Capture of ‘home-videos’ and sharing of videos (see Granny above) gets easier to do, and therefore will be used – leads to all sorts of new local services for IOCs with DSL. I predict that DSL’s inherent return channel capability will prove a boon to IOCs as use of the upstream path increases with demand to upload and share larger and larger files. I will leave the discussion of DRM in some of these scenarios to better men than I!
Repurposing of content and streaming of content to various receiving devices is becoming a focus – good for IOCs who look to make local access to local news, sport, weather, etc a major hook to draw and keep customers without spending too much on content. One particular company SmartVideo ( http://www.smartvideo.com ) caught my eye with its offering of an interesting business model coupled with technology streaming media over the internet to STBs, PDAs and mobile phones. I won’t review their offering further here but it does show the shape of things to come – if any reader is looking at repurposing content this might give you some useful ideas.
IP video was huge. From STBs to long distance delivery mechanisms the drive to fit video, IP telephony and IP data into one wrapper is very clear. I am not advocating or foretelling the demise of much of the current ‘ways to do things’ but from the IOCs’ perspective IP may well give an opportunity to add new services on a commodity platform. The price of IP based equipment almost seems to follow Moore’s Law whereas proprietary systems ‘hold their value’.
COMPRESSION, COMPRESSION, COMPRESSION
The WM9/MPEG4/10/AVC/H264 storm is rising. War always drives innovation; this may not be war, but something is driving progress in compressed video and audio – in quality and in new product offerings. My sources indicate that MPEG4 in its latest guise and WM9 are very similar in ‘quality per bit’. On some types of content MPEG4 ‘wins’ on others WM9 handles the task better. The oft made statement ‘MPEG4 (or WM9 depending on the speaker) is twice as efficient as MPEG2’ needs to be carefully considered. An independent industry source that I actually trust says that both formats produce output at between 60 to 90% of the data rate of a good MPEG2 codec. That is today, but, remember we have gone through nearly a decade of MPEG2 learning curve. Having learned from that, the MPEG4/WM9 curve will be steeper.
I do not want to sound too rosy (try to hum that!) as there is still much work to produce a complete line of encoders and decoders, for SD and HD, while at the same time sorting problems as diverse as concatenation and ‘who owns what code, and how much will I have to pay to use it?’. Concatenation? Code/decode followed by code/decode and so on as a program moves through the chain. This multiple process – particularly when passing between codecs with different algorithms, eg MPEG2>>WM9>>MPEG2>>MPEG4 – may well lead to degradation of the quality. Potentially important when a content owner complains that a distribution medium ‘destroyed’ the quality of his precious film!
And Now For Something Completely Different
Actually not really! There is so much more to talk about – these conferences are multi-million dollar learning curves put on for my (and your) delight!
For example there’s Media Exchange Format (MXF) – the new industry standard for server file format to encapsulate compressed video. This will help Granny one day! A tip: some really great free white papers can be found on Snell and Wilcox’ web site http://www.snellwilcox.com including a review of MXF by the leader of that standards effort.
How about a German company which has put forward a compression scheme that puts high quality stereo compatible Dolby 5.1 into 64kbps – it will be offered as the basis for the MPEG4 HDTV transmission standard. And a digital video camera that records on SDI cards, and a consumer version that combines a 4 Mpixel still camera with a digital movie camera that can also be used as a web cam and act as a data hard drive for $199 (I bought one – couldn’t resist!)……and…. and….
Hmmm…. maybe there’s enough for another article if you readers are interested and Krazy Ken lets me present it! If anyone wants more information on anything mentioned here please send $5 to…. Seriously though, email me at [email protected]
Peter Lowten, [email protected]
P.S. Supercomm and IBC are just around the corner…..
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