Innovative US codec specialist Broadcast International (BI) has announced that it has become a certified encoder supplier to Microsoft Mediaroom, the IPTV middleware platform that drives some of the biggest IPTV services in the world.
On the surface of it that appears to be a fairly low profile event except for the fact that all of the existing Mediaroom deployments use either Microsoft’s VC1 or conventional H.264 or even MPEG2 compression. So is it purely a speculative move on the part of Broadcast International?
Speaking to Steve Jones, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the BI CodecSys Division, he tells us it’s anything but. ‘We have prospects in Latin America and the Far East that want to take Mediaroom into a 4G wireless environment, putting out broadcast HD TV channels over mobile broadband.’
So does he mean over LTE? Or is this WiMAX. ‘It’s WiMAX, it’s something we hope to announce at the end of this year, and we’ve been doing a pilot, and I’ve seen the quality of the HD signal and it’s aimed at set tops not portable devices. The quality is pretty incredible,’ said Jones.
Broadcast International has long threatened to be a ‘game-changer’ in delivering video, over bandwidth constrained networks, using its CodecSys software, but so far there have been no tier 1 takers.
There are probably many reasons for this. CodecSys runs so far on a small server from IBM which uses two of its superfast Cell chips, the ones which drive Sony’s PlayStation 3. The way it works is to take 4 or 5 or more separate codecs, some designed for bright environments, some for dark, some for high speed action, etc.. and encode using each of them. CodecSys then mixes and matches from the outputs, selecting the smallest file segments to create the narrowest stream.
But what started out as a ‘breakthrough’ product is now being slowly reeled in, as conventional H.264 codecs gain more efficiency, but even today CodecSys claims to offer HD programming at between 3 and 6 Mbps, and high quality SD encoding at 1.2 Mbps. It remains roughly 33% ahead of anything else out there. In fact as more efficient codecs come along, CodecSys can harness them (where it can license them) and should be able to continue to stay ahead of any single codec.
Jones also reveals that his company is completely re-engineering the CodecSys product away from reliance on the Cell chip, which when it came out was the only chip powerful enough to drive real time encoding with this many concurrent encode threads. The company says that by the end of the year it will have ported the code to run on Intel’s Nehalem architecture, which drives Intel’s top end Xeon servers.
Earlier this year Intel announced Nehalem-EX and said it would offer up to nine times the memory bandwidth of the previous-generation Xeon and double the memory capacity, with up to 16 memory slots per processor socket. The server can be configured with up to eight processors capable of processing 128 threads simultaneously, all cut in 45 nanometer geometry. It might not be quite as powerful as the Cell, but it will offer that power in a totally general purpose fashion, without as much software adaptation required. And being a standard general purpose, high volume architecture, it will likely end up with cheaper devices than the Cell could offer.
So does that mean that IBM was a bad partner for BI to have in the encoder space? ‘In terms of marketing support you couldn’t get a much better partner than IBM, but we sensed that the Cell chip was really only being seen as mainstream among consumer devices, such as the PlayStation, and IBM began to direct resources away from the Cell program.’
So far the trial installation, which BI won’t name just yet, is not integrated with Mediaroom, as the conformance testing with Microsoft has only just been completed, but now that the conformance is over this should give the operator a way to offer wired IPTV to customers, alongside a WiMAX based HD broadcast option.
Our guess, looking at Mediaroom installations is that this might be someone like Maxcom in Mexico or Claro in the Dominican Republic if it is in Latin America, and perhaps Mio TV in Singapore, if this is in Asia.