Israeli mobile VoIP specialist fring (with a lower case f), has come out with an adaptive streaming system to fix its free video calling system for people who have flat rate mobile data plans. The system naturally is being distributed on the Apple and Android App stores in all fring territories.
fring came to life on the back of Skype-like free calling over mobile data connections and has since added video last year, but it really needed adaptive streaming to stop video calls being dropped all the time. The new adaptive streaming system is pretentiously called Dynamic Video Quality or DVQ Mobile Calling and will come available to millions of fring users from now.
It turns out that although companies like Move Networks invented adaptive streaming, it’s quite easy to write and lots of companies have added the capability, which is why fring hasn’t licensed someone else’s technology, but written this system itself. It adjusts both video bit rate and overall frame rate to get the best match between the network’s current condition and the device you are using, to give the best video quality. Typically the connection in an adaptive system resets itself every two seconds, sometimes less.
The technology dynamically adapts the video picture quality, rather than losing the video call and there is a video on YouTube showing how the video falls away in quality when someone enters a lift, but the call stays connected, and the video automatically improves when they get out of the lift.
One neat little feature is that the bit rate of video in and video out is shown in two figures on the screen. That would become irritating over time, so hopefully there’s a way to turn that feature off, but it’s cool while you are getting used to it.
‘In the year since pioneering mobile video calls, we’ve seen that users network conditions change dramatically during and between video calls. That’s the nature of mobile experiences in heterogeneous networks,’ said Alex Nerst, Co-Founder & CTO of fring. “DVQ lets users make the best use of the peer- to- peer network capacity available at any moment during a video call, regardless of if they’re stepping into an elevator, commuting on a train or simply walking away from their WiFi hub.’
To us that’s code for ‘It was rubbish before but now video calling works properly.’ It will first be offered in the UK.