September 24th Addendum to the Viodi View

Now for my Nostradamus Impression!

Last – and definitely not least! – the attention shown towards MPEG4 and Microsoft Inc.'s Windows Media 9 [WM9] was amazing! To stir the pot even more, Microsoft announced that it would be offering up WM9 for acceptance as an SMPTE Standard. Real debate is starting over the various capabilities contained in the two approaches; many only focus on encoding quality but there are other business and technical requirements being addressed including Digital Rights Management and control issues.

I was privileged to carefully view high quality PAL (generally considered to need 10>>20% more compressed bandwidth than NTSC) on various stands, compressed through a range of MPEG2, WM9 and MPEG4 coder/decoder schemes. I even saw HD compressed ‘off-line’ and decoded in a new MPEG4 decoder – at 4Mbps (from a company called Modulus Video, heavily populated with ex-Divicom alumni)! After this exposure many people have asked me:

‘which is better?’
‘what sort of time scale are we looking at?’
‘how low can we go?’ (also asked at limbo conventions…!).

I will go out on a limb – with all sorts of caveats and CYA statements! - to give my very personal opinions. I do this to generate discussion and clear some of the mists surrounding how these technologies will impact Independent Telcos' business in the future. I also hope to review a few of these issues during Viodi’s Fall, Independent Telco Video Content Conference [iTVcc] in Las Vegas next month.

Realizing that much of what you see at exhibitions are very early approaches, sometimes generated in ways that might not be seen as ‘normal’ ways of doing business (I never said ‘smoke and mirrors’!), and taking into account my experience with the learning curve that MPEG2 quality and cost have traversed in the last 8 years, here’s MY view of the state of the art.

Today the best WM9 is close to twice as bit efficient on controlled coding, and about 1.5 as good as MPEG2 (from an ordinary coder/decoder) on uncontrolled video. To be honest MPEG4 looked almost as good. Some codec vendors are now touting MPEG4 coded standard definition video at well under 1Mbps – it did look good and will certainly find a place in the scheme of things in a year or so. The low bit rate (around 4Mbps) HD MPEG4 isn’t there yet but I’d guess in two years you will see acceptable HD at about 6Mbps on real hardware. As to whether this will be acceptable to Hollywood, I hope we can get some insights during iTVcc.

MPEG2 is not dead! The general consensus is that good, consistent quality on uncontrolled, live video is achievable today at under 3Mbps (some say 2.5). I was asked when MPEG2 would be superceded by WM9, MPEG4 or some other standard. After due consideration (about 3 seconds!), I replied that it’s taken 8years for it to become a solid technology, familiar to a very wide range of technical and business people who understand, accept and trust that it does the job. However the world is moving faster and faster, so for my last Nostradamus prediction: in 8 years MPEG2 will be a very marginal player.

HDTV – Not an Easy Option.

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