General

Beyond VoD

A startup out of Plano, Texas claims it has a better codec, and is using it as a platform for a whole suite of services —including VoD—that ISPs can offer their customers.

by Gerry Blackwell [October 15, 2004]

Keep an eye on ESPRE Solutions Inc. of Plano, Tex., a relatively new player in the IP video fray. ESPRE owns patents on the super-efficient Lightning Strike video codec, which it says is superior to both Microsoft's Windows Media Series 9 and ISO MPEG4. The company has developed several applications around the codec, including video mail, chat, conferencing, and a unique application that works with wirelessly connected PDAs. It is already selling them to carriers and ISPs around the world.

Now ESPRE has announced it is acquiring Modular Computing Systems Inc. (MCS), a Carrollton, Tex. company currently developing an end-to-end video on demand (VoD) solution based on the Lightning Strike codec. The system is targeted at telephone companies and ISPs that want to compete with cable and satellite pay TV providers. The VoD solution, along with other new products, will be launched in the first quarter of 2005, says the company's president and CEO Pete Ianace.

Ianace and partner Kyle Nelson, the company's chief marketing officer, formed ESPRE last December with angel financing. The name, pronounced ESS-pree, is an acronym formed from five first names. The company has been trading on the OTC stock board since July, starting at $1.01 but climbing into the $6 range recently. It currently has about 20 employees.

A better, old codec
While ESPRE is new, the technology is not, Ianace explains. It was originally developed by Vianet Technologies Inc., a VoIP long distance company he co-owned and headed before launching ESPRE. Vianet went out of business last year after its three major carrier customers all filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection within a few months of each other.

"The Lightning Strike technology has been under development for over 10 years and has had $25 to $30 million in R&D funds invested in it," he says. "That's why it's so advanced. It's not like we just started developing it when we launched the company."

Ianace claims the codec is faster than competitors, uses less hardware resources and produces smaller files for a given quality of video. According to testing by ESPRE, encoding the same one-minute video clip at 720 by 480 pixels takes the Lightning Strike codec one minute, Windows Media Series 9 three minutes and four seconds, and ISO MPEG4 one minute. The Microsoft codec is not real time, Ianace points out, Lightning Strike is.

When encoding on the same 3 GHz Pentium 4 PC, Lightning Strike uses 27 percent of CPU capacity, Windows Media uses 87 percent, MPEG4 35 to 40. When decoding, the ESPRE codec uses 3 to 18 percent of capacity, Windows Media Series 9 uses 23 to 27 percent and MPEG 16 to 22 percent. Lightning Strike also has a 30 to 50 percent better compression ratio than Windows Media Series 9.

"You either get a much smaller file size for the same quality, or much better quality for a given file size," Ianace says.

Lightning Strike is also, perhaps surprisingly, compatible with more professional video editors than the Microsoft codec, including Adobe Premiere, Sony's Vegas Video, and Liquid Edition from Pinnacle Systems. And unlike other codecs, Ianace says, the ESPRE technology has been tuned for specific applications. "Most codecs tend to be general purpose—they're good on some applications, not so good for others. Ours is good for all," he says.

The company is predictably close-mouthed about how it achieved the technical advantages it claims for Lightning Strike. Ianace will say that it's a wavelet-based codec and for that reason produces a better key frame than DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) compression systems. Wavelet compression converts an image into a series of wavelets—a mathematical function—that can be stored more efficiently than pixel blocks, the common method in DCT systems.

The codec also uses integer-based compression algorithms which are faster, Ianace explains, "because you're not dealing with decimal points." These approaches are by no means original or unique to ESPRE, though. MPEG4 uses wavelet compression, for example. The company has additional patents pending on its codec technology.

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