Scalable Video Coding

Industry News Summary – Vidyo, LTE, LightRadio

June 21, 2011 By IMTC Leave a Comment

Vidyo to offer white-label video chat application
Vidyo, a long-time member of IMTC and advocate of Scalable Video Coding – announced an application portal program that would enable service providers to create white-label video chat applications using the companies proprietary technology (Vidyo already power the technology behind Google’s video chat). Just recently, Vidyo announced it’s low cost multi-screen Telepresence solution -

VoLTE Introduction
Alotough I doubt any of our readers don’t know what VoLTE is – In case I’m wrong, the following article by Maisie Ramsay from WirelessWeek is highly recommended. The article summaries VoLTE and it’s current industry status.

Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio – An ultra small cellular base station
Telco 2.0 tells us about Alcatel-lucent latest innovation in the cellular radio field – the LightRadio 6×6 inch base station.
This small box is expected to revolutionize mobile network coverage and power requirements.

LightSquared: Solved GPS interference issues, Network go as planned
LightSquared, the satellite based wholesale LTE network caused major concern to GPS connectivity in it’s initial tests, causing interference in GPS in up to 22 miles distance from LightSquared cell towers. Recently the company announced it’s solved it’s interference issues by reducing the towers power output by 50% and retune it’s frequencies a bit further away from the GPS channel.

About the writer: IMTC

Filed Under: Industry News Tagged With: Alcatel-Lucent, Global Positioning System, International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC), IntoMobile, LightSquared, Om Malik, Scalable Video Coding, Vidyo

IMTC SVC & QoE Workshop

March 27, 2011 By Paul Ritchie 1 Comment

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

About the writer: Paul Ritchie

Filed Under: Events, IMTC News, Interoperability, Telepresence, Unified Communication Tagged With: International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC), Scalable Video Coding, Videoconferencing

IMTC Members Overview – Vidyo

October 14, 2010 By Itzhak Wolkowicz 3 Comments

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.