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Multimedia Next generation networks poised to change communications

According to a recent PC Magazine article, streaming audio and video to portable devices will change the world as much as cellular phones have.

Right now, the world thinks of video from a broadcast perspective to a stationary device. For example, a standard video scenario is watching the local 6 o’clock news in your living room , in a stationary environment and only at 6 o’clock.

In the Internet space, a standard streaming video scenario is watching a news broadcast from a fixed location at your desktop computer. In the near future though, you may choose to watch a segment of the 6 o’clock San Diego news from the airport in Hong Kong at 9 a.m., while waiting for a flight back home.

Alternately, you may want to step off a plane in Las Vegas and view some local hotel and casino tours while waiting for your luggage.

Consumers and business users will soon have access to this type of relevant, full-motion video from any location through their mobile device.

As cellular operators upgrade their networks to next generation, 2.5G and 3G, networks with data speeds ranging from 20 kilobits per second (Kbps) up to 300+ Kbps, they will be able to offer their subscribers access to a variety of enhanced services. These services will include news and financial stories, sports highlights, short entertainment clips and music videos, weather and traffic reports, home or work security cameras, and corporate communications, from any location where they have cell phone access.

As these next generation networks are deployed, the wireless multimedia market is going to soar. Worldwide use of wireless technologies has grown rapidly as cellular telephony and other emerging wireless communications services have become widely available and increasingly affordable.


– Wireless Users Mushroom By 2003

Recent IDC analyst estimates project that total worldwide wireless subscribers will reach 1.2 billion by 2003, surpassing Internet users by more than 50 percent.

The technology that will enable mobile users to access multimedia will benefit several different groups, including wireless silicon and device manufacturers, wireless operators, content providers and advertisers, and finally consumers and business users.

Wireless silicon and device manufacturers benefit from the rollout of wireless multimedia because it requires consumers to upgrade their handsets to new multimedia-enabled devices, driving new demand and revenue for their products.

Wireless operators will be able to reduce churn (an industry term to describe the phenomenon of subscribers switching service providers) by providing a differentiated offering and applications. The additional revenue opportunities will also help justify the cost of upgrading their networks to 2.5 and 3G.

Through this new distribution channel, content providers and advertisers will benefit from wireless multimedia by providing them a means to reach a new, elusive, but highly targeted audience, with branded content.

Consumers and business users though are the ultimate winners in this new form of communication. Imagine being able to see your children from the road to say “goodnight” or receive a video-greeting message from a friend on your handset.

What about the freedom of watching your favorite sports team’s highlight from the airport, while checking the traffic from a live camera before you decide which direction to go; having instantaneous news or personal communication in a time of crisis; or watching a movie trailer and buying tickets for a movie from a restaurant.


– Stay in Touch Anytime, Anywhere

Business applications could include: remote training of a widely dispersed sales force; live remote surveillance of stores or businesses for security purposes; or doctors doing virtual “house calls” to check in on their patients from remote locations. Wireless multimedia enables mobile users to access untethered communications, from anywhere , anytime.

In order to ensure that wireless operators will be able to deliver multimedia data in the form of video, audio, text and graphics to a mobile users’ cellular telephone or mobile computer, there are essential guidelines that must be met.

Today, when a consumer purchases a cellular handset he doesn’t know with absolute certainty that the device he’s purchased will work on any cellular network anywhere in the world. This is in part due to the lack of open international standards from the telecommunications industry.

Standards, governing everything from the type of speech compression technology used to transmit a voice call to the amount of power that can radiate from the device, are essential to ensure interoperability among devices and networks. Manufacturers then have to distinguish their products from their competitors through a combination of price and features.

The price of a device is generally related to the efficiency of the implementation of the standards specified. Additional features usually require innovative and efficient ways of supporting multiple standards in a single device.

To enable the new mobile multimedia market and seamless use of services independent of location, mobile operators have demanded solutions that are built on open standards. For this reason, two collaborative standards bodies were created to provide global specifications for next generation wireless networks and devices.


– Wireless Network Standards Proposed

These bodies, called the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and 3GPP2, have recommended the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG-4) solution for the delivery of rich media over wireless networks to mobile devices.

Representatives from more than 100 top consumer electronics companies, governments, international research centers and universities developed the MPEG-4 standard, which is ideally suited for the delivery of rich media over wireless networks. The MPEG-4 specification focuses on the image quality and compression of video, audio, images and graphics for both two-way interactive streaming, such as videoconferencing, and one-way streaming applications, such as watching a movie trailer.

An important feature of MPEG-4 is that it contains elements that are designed to assist in determining whether information received has been corrupted during transmission and concealing the effects of this corrupted data. A second and equally important feature of MPEG-4 is that it allows for a single encoded file to be retrieved at different data rates, saving content companies the resources and expense of encoding their content into multiple files at various data rates.

Compliance with open standards like MPEG-4 is the only way to facilitate the growing interaction and convergence of the previously separate worlds of telecommunications, computing and mass media. Access to rich multimedia from anywhere , anytime will give users more control over their lives by delivering relevant video images, audio, information, entertainment, and transaction-based services when and where they want them.

Brailean is the chief executive officer, president and co-founder of San Diego-based PacketVideo Corp.

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