IMTC will be holding a SVC & QoE Workshop during our SuperOp!, May 16-20. This is an open call to all IMTC members to participate, AND, submit proposals for speaker slots and presentations. Please review the outline below, and if you have any interest, please contact me, or send your request to our IMTC Service Desk at Help@imtc.org.

What: IMTC SuperOp! SVC & QoE Workshop, May 18-19

When: Two Sessions to cover Time zone & Geography differences
· Session 1: Wednesday May 18, 3-5pm (local time Hawaii)
· Session 2: Thursday May 19, 9-11am (local time Hawaii)

SVC, QoE, and the Future of Video Communication

This workshop, organized as part of IMTC SuperOp! 2011, is intended to bring together experts in the field to discuss what SVC means to the videoconferencing and UC industries, what is missing in terms of standards support, and what steps should the industry take to ensure interoperability.

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the scalable extension of the H.264 video coding standard. Finalized in 2007, it promises to revolutionize the video communications industry due to its ability to simultaneously achieve increased adaptability to heterogeneity of endpoints and networks, provide very large scalability, obtain significantly improved error resilience, and enable very low delay even in multipoint sessions. Nearly all videoconferencing vendors today support it or have made announcements that that they will, and UC vendors are following suit. Contrary to just being an evolutionary codec upgrade, it may signal significant architectural changes in packet video communication.

Quality of Experience (QoE) refers to the perceived quality that a service or application offers to its users. It’s a purely subjective but extremely important measure of user satisfaction, and may have significant predictive value for the adoption of a service.
There is an ongoing argument in the industry that SVC will help significantly increase the QoE for video communication, and will thus enable the industry to grow alongside UC and other network-based services – this is one of the items which is expected to be discussed at the workshop.

IMTC is hosting this workshop to explore these issues, and offer our members the opportunity to present their views, and how their company, and IMTC, can help move this issue forward in the industry.

If you would like a time-slot on the agenda, Speaker proposals should be sent to our IMTC Service desk at Help@IMTC.org by April 4, 2011, and include the speaker’s name, affiliation, and presentation title.

Thank you for your attention to this important workshop and please mark you calendars to attend.
Regards, Paul Ritchie
IMTC Executive Director