General

Envisioning IPTV With MPEG-4

This ILEC spinoff has the expertise to deliver a complete IPTV solution now. The company also has a clear idea of which ISPs can do IPTV—and which cannot.

by Gerry Blackwell [January 21, 2005]

The emerging IPTV market continues to percolate. Can ISPs grab a piece of the action? In our continuing quest for enlightenment on how this space is likely to unfold and where ISPs might fit, we talked recently to Envivio Inc., a U.S.-based IPTV spin-off from the many-tentacled France Telecom.

Envivio, formed in 1999, offers digital video solutions in four broad application areas: transport of video signals (for broadcasters), enterprise streaming video, mobile video (in partnership with Real Networks) and IPTV. All are built around MPEG-4, the advanced codec developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group, a committee of the International Standards Organization (ISO), and H.264, a video encoding layer in MPEG-4.

MPEG-4 is being promoted as a successor to MPEG-2, the current standard in broadcast digital television, because MPEG-4 requires about half the bandwidth to transmit roughly the same quality of video.

Advocates say MPEG-4 is also the ideal solution for IPTV. Most existing IPTV services still use MPEG-2.

Backed by movie production houses and other video content owners, MPEG-4 has already been approved by many European and Asia-Pacific jurisdictions for use in broadcasting and will likely be approved in North America as well. Regulatory changes required for broadcasters to use it do not apply to service providers with private networks, however. IPTV providers can use MPEG-4 now.

There are other video codec technologies available. Indeed, a standards war is shaping up between MPEG-4 and Microsoft's Windows Media Series 9 codec, which Microsoft is using in its own IPTV offerings.

Envivio founder and president Julien Signes, who, like other senior Envivio employees, was involved in developing the MPEG-4 standard, says the company could adapt its products to work with other codecs—including Windows Media—but the trend is clearly in favor of MPEG-4.

Windows Media will, he believes, end up an also-ran in IPTV for a couple of reasons. For one thing, a good chunk of the intellectual property in the Microsoft technology actually belongs to MPEG and Microsoft will face licensing problems as a result. He also insists that Windows Media is simply inferior to MPEG-4 as a codec.

"All the national [broadcast] committees outside the U.S. have already or are in the process of adding MPEG-4 [provisions]," Signes says. "No government is going to say you can broadcast in [Windows Media] specifically—it's just not going to happen." This need not stop IPTV providers using it, of course, but it could slow industry acceptance of the Microsoft technology.

Completing IPTV
Envivio's MPEG-4-based IPTV offering is a complete hardware-software solution for service providers looking to offer live, full-resolution, full-frame-rate services in competition with cable and satellite providers, as well as video on demand (VOD) and interactive services. It includes authoring, encoding, decoding, management, and playback components.

Who is Envivio targeting with its solution? The company started by selling it to major telephone companies overseas, mainly for field and lab trials. A telco in Poland has successfully completed a field trial. Telcos in Japan and Norway are currently doing lab tests. The real surge in IPTV activity has yet to come, though.

"The biggest impediment to deployment [of MPEG-4-based systems] to this point has been [the cost of] set top boxes," Signes explains. "Until there are cost-effective chips for set top boxes, the economics for service providers just aren't there." Several box makers were expected to introduce lower-cost chip-based products at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

"That will remove the last barriers," Signes predicts. "Between Q1 and Q2 of this year, we expect to see several key deployments."

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