MPEG-4 AVC to deliver greater bit-rate reduction in coming years
Oct 24, 2006 10:00 PM
For IPTV service providers, competing with cable operators over the coming months and years is likely to require the ability to deliver at least one or more channels of HD programming to the home.
The challenge for the majoring of IPTV service providers who don’t turn to fiber is bandwidth. An HD channel requires substantially more bandwidth than SD, and with a limited pipe into the home, that can be a problem.
However, compression advancements such as MPEG-4 AVC are offering IPTV service providers an alternative to a massive rebuild of infrastructure by reducing the bandwidth to needed to transmit HD.
IPTV Update turned to Bob Wilson, chairman and CEO of MPEG-4 AVC solution provider Modulus Video, to gain more insight on the impact that advanced video compression is having on IPTV service delivery.
IPTV Update: How would you characterize the acceptance of MPEG-4 AVC on the part of IPTV service providers to date in the United States and abroad? Will the pace of its adoption accelerate in 2007?
Bob Wilson: First of all, when people talk about IPTV, I always make sure we’re all talking about the same thing, and that is telcos putting video over their broadband networks.
We are seeing a tremendous amount of activity right now on the MPEG-4 front for both high-definition and standard-definition applications. I’m not aware of any significant deployments that are going on that are not happening with MPEG-4 right now. That’s a big shift in the last year.
A year ago, there were still some people working in MPEG-2 and still some discussions about VC-1. Since that time, it seems that well into the 90 percent range of operators have made the call that they are going with MPEG-4 AVC. It is the standard, and it is the way that both here in the U.S. and abroad people are going to be moving video over their broadband networks.
As far as the pace of adoption, we’re absolutely seeing acceleration. I was at a conference a week or so ago, which is a co-op of local telcos. This is not AT&T or Verizon but all of the other guys, about 750 members. According to their NRTC’s executive director, 200 of them already have standard-definition MPEG-2 video applications running on some level of their networks. His estimation was that in the next three years, all of them will not only switch from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 because of the need to get to HD, but that virtually all of their members have plans to roll out MPEG-4-AVC-based video services over the next three years. So, we see rapid adoption here and a big jump in terms of what the telcos want to do with video here in the U.S.
IPTVU: Please discuss the impact of MPEG-4 AVC compression efficiency on planning for IPTV infrastructure capital expenditure.
BW: What we are able to do now with this technology is present the telcos with a viable strategy to get high-definition TV to their end users. You could put a credible service together with either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 for standard def. But the only way you can deliver high definition in a cost-effective way is to go with MPEG-4 AVC.
The example I will give you is Verizon. Verizon is spending upwards of $20 billion to build out its network infrastructure right now, and it is running fiber right to the homes of its customers in order to do that. It felt it needed a lot more bandwidth to get its MPEG-2-based system to the point where it can serve multiple HD channels to the home and broadband services and so forth.
AT&T, which is a customer of ours, has got a similar roll-out that it is doing, and it has announced that it is spending in the neighborhood of $4 billion to do that. The real difference is the amount of investment it is making in the network. It’s using ADSL2 technology and running the broadband signals over twisted pair or over its copper service from the neighborhood to the home.
That saves a tremendous amount of money in the network, the labor and so on in order to get the bandwidth to the home. The only way it can do that is to use MPEG-4, and it has as recently as this week announced that by the end of this year, it’ll be in between 15 and 20 markets here in the U.S., providing both standard-definition and high-definition signals to its end users. So going MPEG-4 has a huge impact on the amount of investment you have to make in the network as opposed to the older and more conventional technologies.
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