IMTC: Interoperability, Multimedia and Standards
IMTC Blog is proud to Interview Frédéric Gabin, Standardization Manager at Ericsson, France and IMTC Board of Directors member:
IMTC Blog: Hello Frédéric, Please Tell us about yourself, your positions in Ericsson and past positions.
Mr.Gabin: My name is Frédéric Gabin, I’m French and I live in Paris, France. My role in the Ericsson standardization organization since 2008 is to lead and coordinate the development of Multimedia standards. I started my career as a signal processing research engineer in 1998 and since then was involved in research, system design and standards with both network and mobile terminal vendors.
IMTC Blog: Why did you volunteered to be an IMTC board member?
Mr.Gabin: The IMTC organization has a strong history of making upcoming key multimedia features a reality without which originating standards would look like mere litterature. The board member position gives a direct ability of steering the organization towards the real needs of my company and the industry. I wanted to be part of this.
IMTC Blog: What are your goals as an IMTC board member ?
Mr.Gabin: My goals are to give existing and future AGs visibility and support in their developments by establishing clear directions in agreement with the key industry players.
IMTC Blog: How does IMTC benefit Ericsson?
Mr.Gabin: IMTC benefits Ericsson as well as ST-Ericsson and Sony-Ericsson in that it gives a framework for terminal interop tests of key multimedia services which speeds up deployments and adoption on the market.
IMTC Blog: In your opinion – What are IMTC greatest achievements? what were 2010 greatest achievements?
Mr.Gabin: IMTC greatest achievements in 2010 were that VoLTE F2F test events started February 2-4 (Ericsson AB), Stockholm and October 20-22 (Nokia Siemens Networks), Athens.
IMTC Blog: What are the major goals for IMTC at 2011? What are the major interoperability issues for 2011 (in Ericsson, in the industry as a whole)?
Mr.Gabin: Firstly, with more and more fragmentation in the various multimedia standards and fast pace deployments, for example in streaming services, one major goal for IMTC is to avoid fragmentation itself and focus on the most relevant standards and services. Secondly, the ongoing deployments of LTE networks around the world should drive a focus on VoLTE terminal interoperability undertaken in the IMS AG . This group should grow by involving more operators and device vendors.
We thank Frédéric for his time and dedication.
As always, If your company does IMS, VoLTE – Join IMTC to help shape the future of Telecommunication Interoperability.
Frédéric Gabin can be reached via E-mail: frederic.gabin@ericsson.com or LinkedIN – http://fr.linkedin.com/in/fredericgabin
Frédéric Gabin, Ericsson
IMTC Members Overview is a series of interviews with our member companies.
IMTC Members comprises most of the key players in the Telepresence and Unified Communication fields.
Our first interview is with Dr. Alex Eleftheriadis, Chief scientist and co-founder of Vidyo.
IMTC: Could you describe to our readers what does your company do?
Alex.E: Vidyo, Inc. pioneered Personal Telepresence by enabling multi-party video conferences that offer natural, HD-quality, face-to-face interactions over regular IP networks using commodity desktop systems as endpoints. Vidyo’s patented technologies leverage the new H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard to produce award-winning products renowned for delivering the best error resilience and lowest latency for HD-quality video conferencing over the Internet. Engineering-wise, we eliminated the big-iron MCU and replaced it with the agile VidyoRouter.
IMTC: Do you consider Vidyo products as “Telepresence” or “video-conferencing” solutions? Why?
Alex.E: We use the term “Personal Telepresence” to indicate that we offer the level of quality associated with telepresence systems but on a personal system, and on a personal level. Indeed, in our systems you can see multiple participants, with each face shown in at least SD quality and with extremely low latency. Admittedly, the typical telepresence “environment” is nice, but it has a $299,000 upfront cost and $9,900 montly operating cost. The challenge that we believe we have successfully addressed through engineering innovation is to make telepresence-level quality available to everyone for a reasonable cost.
IMTC: What so special about Scalable Video Coding? Do we really need it with high speed connections?
Alex.E: Absolutely. High speed connections are like interstate highways – you can go fast, but you are still sharing the road with others. Scalable video coding allows us to do two very important things that were not possible before. First, move away from the decades-old architecture of the MCU and move to the architecture of the agile, feature-rich, ultra low delay video router. We can support 100 HD connections on a single 1RU rack unit that has no custom hardware. That should tell you something about the benefits of having the right architecture. Second, scalability allows us to introduce unparalleled error resilience. High speed connections make HD videoconferencing on the Internet possible; scalability, and the system innovations that we have designed into our products, make it a compelling experience, any time, all the time. It’s not a novelty, or a demo; its a work tool you can rely on.
IMTC: We know that Vidyo technology powers Google Chat, are there any other freely available consumer products based on your technology? Anything planned you can share with us?
Alex.E: Nothing that we can announce at this time. By design, our system is software that can potentially run on any video-enabled device. So other than a small number of hadrware-specific endpoints, all other devices that people will have will be able to download an application. You can take a look at our VideoMobile demonstration in our website to see the breadth of what’s possible already (http://www.vidyo.com/tabletvideo/).
IMTC: What is the importance of Interoperability for a company like Vidyo?
Alex.E: Interoperability and standards are extremely important to Vidyo. Ever since the company was founded, in 2005, we have been very active in the ITU-T group that standardized H.264, and participated in the development and standardization of H.264 SVC with numerous contributions. We were the only videoconferencing company contributing to SVC. I personally served as Co-Editor of the H.264 SVC Conformance specification, and Vidyo has donated test video sequences as well as a large percentage of the conformance bitstreams that are now part of the standard. We have also been very active in the IETF, in the AVT group as well as others. I served as Co-Editor of the RTP Payload format for SVC. Other colleagues at Vidyo have authored numerous Internet drafts and RFCs. We are members of the IMTC, participated in last year’s SuperOp!, and recently joined UCIF as well.
The Vidyo system represents an architectural innovation. As a result, a lot of existing specifications lack features that are needed to make things work the way they should in the new architecture. We are working to bring these specifications up-to-speed, and ensure that systems can talk to each other. A few years back I remember that I had to explain to people what SVC is. I am very happy to see that, now, everybody talks (or wants to talk) SVC.
We Thank Dr. Alex Eleftheriadis from Vidyo for the interview, be sure to follow our RSS feed or Twitter account for the next interviews with IMTC members, Telepresence and Unified communication news and Industry events.
IMTC president Anatoli Levine was interviewed for TMCnet website.
In his interview Anatoli talked about his predictions in the fields of video communication, 4G networks and mobile platforms.
Click here to read the Interview [TMCnet]
Anatoli Levine is the senior director of product management at Radvision and IMTC President. With more than 20 years of professional experience in management, communication technologies and software engineering. Anatoli has been closely involved with IMTC activities, where he chaired a number of technical Activity Groups and served on the board of directors for 4 years.
