IMTC: Interoperability, Multimedia and Standards
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
If you are puzzled by the title, don’t be – it will all make sense along the way, I promise. The post might be a bit long, but it will be easy to read.
Last week, IMTC conducted its first ever CTO Roundtable. IMTC is really an engineering consortium, so the idea of bringing together a group of people defining today’s and tomorrow’s communication technology and solutions was brewing for a some time.
However, it is not enough to bring together technologists to talk about their favorite subject (as to putting more and better bits on the wire) – all is great in a simple world. We (IMTC member companies) are developing communication technologies and then there are people who are actually using them every day – and it would be great to hear from them, our users. And to keep us all honest and focused, we invited analysts to lead the discussions.
So we actually managed to do it. About 50 people got together in the room at AT&T offices in Middletown, New Jersey, on March 8 and 9 – CTOs, Product people, our users and analysts. Then we heard about great promise of the technology, and we heard about pain (often unexpected) it causes to those who have to put it together and make it useful. Need example? How about 700 conference rooms, fully equipped with video conferencing equipment and literally not being used in years?
We found that our industry is polluted. Polluted with free radicals. One of the analysts, David Yedwab, compiler together a list of issues rose during presentations – words ending with “ion” = free radicals. Same as free radicals in our bodies, they are doing destructive work and should be contained and put under control. Curios? Here is the list:
| Proliferation | Translation | Integration | Solution |
| Collaboration | Interaction | Federation | Session |
| Interoperation | Organization | Adoption | Communication |
| Simplification | Compression | Automation | Authorization |
| Operation | Standardization | Telecommunication | Fragmentation |
| Iteration | Location | Connection | Reservation |
| Vision | Champion | Assumption | Application |
| Optimization | Transcription | Caption | Production |
| Selection | Facilitation | Mobilization | Disruption |
| Monetization | Personalization and (least common) Denomination | ||
This blog post is too short to discuss all of the issues. However, if we can focus for a moment on just one of them, it was my personal revelation to see that one of the biggest obstacles in making video communications useful in enterprise is … Calendar, or in the other words, scheduling of the resources need to conduct successful communication session! It is a problem in the big organization to be able to schedule (time to invent a word for another free radical: Schedulization) a video conference call and request and allocate all logistical resources with one simple click of a button.
Had being involved with IMTC and video communication industry for almost 13 years now, I’m definitely glad to note that we’ve grown up immensely. There was no talk about bad quality of the audio and video being a show stopper. We mastered the basics, and it is time to move up to the next level, and let all the technology work together – and be headache-free to use. We managed to identify the issues – we need to move forward to solve them, one issue at a time. IMTC will work on it, but consider this an open call to action – it is the time to join IMTC and be the part of the solution…
IMTC SuperOp! 2011, premier annual Interoperability Testing event, will take place in Kona, Hawaii, during the week of May 16-20.
During the event, IMTC members will get together to test various IP Video communications systems and technologies ranging from SIP and H.323 to VoLTE and IMS. During this event, Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) implementations will be tested for the first time ever.
Registration is open at http://www.regonline.com/superopkona
IMTC official announcement can be found here (PDF).
IMTC has scheduled its first ever CTO Technology Session on March 8-9, 2011 at the AT&T Offices in Middletown, New Jersey. This is a forward looking session that will provide you will analyst information of the key technologies, markets and growth rates for UC, Video and Collaboration solutions. It is also intended, that the group will look at how all these technologies come together with a seamless, interoperable solution.
Historically IMTC has been at the center of communication industry technology changes as noted by our work with H.323, H.264, SIP Parity, IMS, T120, H.320 and PSS, 3G-324M, and other profiles for standard telephony protocols. Communications industry is changing rapidly, and IMTC is helping its members to embrace the change.
In addition to Keynote Speakers from AT&T, Cisco and Polycom, below is a list of confirmed speakers:
Confirmed Speakers:
The IMTC is pleased to invite all IMTC member companies to this FREE event. We’ll strive to provide you with information and answers to the following questions:
1. What is the current state of the communications industry?
2. What defines video communications today (Skype, Google, Apple, H.323 and SIP) and how it plays into Unified Communications?
3. How do these various video and unified communication solutions come together into a seamless cloud or enterprise implementation?
4. Where should your company spend its resources in order to solve our customers key pain points?
5. What are the key enterprise customer use cases?
6. Where do telepresence solutions fit?
7. What do I need to know about SVC? How does it impact the above?
8. What are the key dependencies impeding interoperability between equipment, network and cloud services?
9. What is the role of devices such as tablets and smart phones in the unified communication mix and specifically with video communications and how do they affect enterprise implementations?
Together with our member companies, the IMTC would like to build a roadmap of key industry technology initiatives to be addressed in order for the seamless communications cloud to work.
This IMTC event is closed to only IMTC member companies. You can send as many representatives from a member company as you like, however we encourage you to invite senior product management and CTO types of individuals.
Venue:
AT&T Offices
200 Laurel Avenue South
Middletown, New Jersey 07748
Closest Airport:
EWR (Newark)
Nearby Hotels:
http://www.research.att.com/evergreen/about_us/middletown_hotels.html
