We have written extensively that it takes much more than a codec to deliver high quality voice. Though we haven’t paid as much attention to it, the same principle also applies to video. I agree that a good codec is better than a bad codec, however a good codec is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition to produce good video. In GIPS VideoEngine we work a lot with the codec settings, picture enhancements outside of the codec, jitter buffers, bitrate control and other parameters to achieve the best possible quality. Despite our best efforts, quality can also be affected by hardware, such as webcams and monitors. Even television and movies can suffer if they are not displayed on the right devices, or are transmitted using poor methods.   

I recently spent a week at our San Francisco office and took a late night flight back to Europe. I had planned to sleep most of the time, but during dinner I watched a movie with a recent Academy Award winner and the quality was terrible. The actors were good, I liked the movie, but the picture quality might have been the worst I’ve ever seen. In this case I think it was actually due to both bad encoding and bad equipment. The monitor wasn’t good, which is to be expected from airplane equipment, but the colors for dark images had really bad circular patterns. This phenomenon can be observed in a video call when not enough bits have been spent on the colors, especially at low bitrates, but I have never hear of this problem for watching a movie.          

Passengers Deserve Better Video

I bought a new plasma TV about a year ago and that really improved the video quality at home. After a while we bought new cables to use for our DVD player and the digital TV decoder, and the quality improved even more. I really like sports, especially the Swedish hockey playoffs and Tour de France, and our new TV has made watching them even more enjoyable, as long as the right channels broadcast the events. The introduction to one Swedish weekly sports show has the same annoying color pattern I saw on the flight. Spending some more bits on the colors would probably help, and if they made some changes to the bitrate control they might get rid of the really annoying blocky video that appears when they cut away to show the spectators. It’s amazing they have these problems, as I don’t think our customers would approve of this in a normal video conversation, even at low bitrates. Do the producers and network execs not have the right knowledge, or are they trying to cut costs? Maybe both?

The same blocky video quality can also be seen in some DVD movies for kids. I guess movie studios think children are not as discerning as adults. On the other hand, there are some children’s movies that have absolute top quality. My son loves the movie Cars, and even though I have probably seen Lightning McQueen roaring around the speedway for at least a thousand laps, the quality Pixar produces amazes me every time. Every scene is really great, no blocks, no bad colors, no bad nothing.  

Visiting the US isn’t just about work and long flights, it’s also about shopping. This time I ended up buying an iPod touch and I must admit the screen quality is great, a feature which saved my flight back home.

 Before ending the long post, I must give some credit to SVT, the Swedish TV provider owned by the government. SVT Play is their service for watching movies, shows and news on the internet, and mobile devices. Despite what my colleague Stefan has witnessed, I have always been impressed with their quality.

So yes, the codec is a big part of the video experience. But some products and services get it right, while others flounder, proving that hardware and transmission techniques are just as important.

Last week, Google continued its shopping spree by acquiring San Francisco startup Episodic, a company which provides a platform for real-time video streaming and management. While Google has not yet announced what they plan to do with the acquisition, it is fairly safe to assume the technology will somehow get incorporated into the YouTube platform.

As a company which supplies real-time communications technology, we at GIPS hear quite a bit about real-time streaming technology. To be honest, the term “real-time streaming” seemed to be an oxymoron at first. How can something be considered “real-time” if it is being buffered and sent out with some significant amount of delay? However, the more I have thought about it, the more I think I understand the term. In my somewhat professional opinion, content could be streamed “real-time” if it is more or less being sent as it is captured. The difference between streaming and real-time communication is that streaming is strictly a one way street. There is no interaction between video senders and recipients; simply a video broadcast being sent out as it happens.

While I am not sure of the revenue potential for such technology (never let that stand in Google’s way), I can think of a few interesting applications, citizen journalism being one of them. Take yesterday’s 10^th Annual Bring Your Own Big Wheel race in San Francisco, perhaps my favorite day of the year. What if you didn’t want to brave the rain as a spectator, but still wanted to watch adults go down San Francisco’s curviest street on children’s toys? You could watch videos like the one below (notice Andrew in red at the start, and me in white at the 1:55 mark) in more or less real time.

Now, many people would be fine just watching an archived version of these kinds of events, but maybe there are enough folks who want to view it as it happens so they can feel like they are really there. To me it seems like two social trends- the on-demand/ DVR mentality, and the reality TV/ 15 minutes of fame world- are colliding head on. My guess is Google will simply add another feature to YouTube to make it easier to load and watch mobile videos, but that it will hardly revolutionize the site.

Sweden has exceptional public service television called SVT. During the winter Olympics, SVT broadcasted the most popular events, sometimes two or three at a time on different channels. As if that’s not enough, they also have a free web service called SVT Play, where they streamed almost all Olympic competition in good quality. Finally, for those really devoted to sports, SVT even has an iPhone app for watching the broadcasts on the go.

At first glance, the quality of the online stream appears to be really good. They’re encoding at a bit rate of 810 kbps and defaults to using Flash, probably with ON2 VP6 as the codec. For the Windows user, Windows Media is also available.

However, most people probably prefer to watch the stream in full screen mode. This is where I think SVT Play fails to deliver. If you look at the image below, which is a part of a full screen video sequence on SVT Play, you can see severe aliasing at the edges. This is the most apparent at the edge between the man’s neck and his shirt.

The aliasing appears due to bad – or nonexistent – interpolation when upsampling the images. Whether or not this has to do with problems with Flash or SVT Play I cannot tell for sure, but we can at least assume it can be solved since watching a YouTube video (which also uses Flash) in full screen looks good, as is demonstrated in the screen capture of a section of a full screen YouTube clip below.

There have recently been a lot of discussions about the video tag in HTML5, and what codecs to use with it. Some prefer license-free codecs, while some prefer the best possible performance. But one thing is for sure: regardless of how good your codec is, the experience is what is most important. Having bad post-processing will always have the last say, no matter how many bits and CPU cycles you spend on encoding your video source.

So it’s now official – Yahoo is not just utilizing GIPS HD voice technology but as of today it’s also using GIPS VideoEngine to provide the high-quality video calling you would expect from GIPS.

As Dave Merriwether, senior director of Yahoo! Messenger said: “The GIPS VideoEngine enables us to provide the Yahoo! Messenger community with the best video experience possible. Now people can enjoy full-screen, face-to-face chats with friends and family at no cost, in the familiar Yahoo! Messenger environment.”

Since early 2006, GIPS has provided the underlying voice technology for Yahoo! Messenger but now Yahoo! have done an amazing job of revamping the new Yahoo! messenger 10.

“We’re proud to work with Yahoo! to deliver a truly differentiated high quality video experience for the hundreds of millions of people on Yahoo! Messenger around the world,” said Emerick Woods, GIPS CEO.

“The GIPS VideoEngine enables us to provide the Yahoo! Messenger community with the best video experience possible. Now people can enjoy full-screen, face-to-face chats with friends and family at no cost, in the familiar Yahoo! Messenger environment.”

I would encourage you to try it out – the real-time video quality is amazing and as TechCrunch stated in their live blog from Yahoo’s office: “High quality video call. (Quality does look nice in the demo). Share photos during the video call. Fullscreen works too.”

Here’s a screen shot I took a few weeks ago of one of our engineers, Jan, talking with my colleague, John who was amazed at the video quality and how much hair the engineer had cut off at the barbershop the week before. See it’s important to be able to see people’s reactions and also hear them as it enables much better communication.

GIPS Improves Video Quality THIS MUCH!

Now if this was a satirical news quiz show I would ask for answers on a postcard with your caption for the photo. Given that we’re on a blog feel free to send in your caption for the photo in the comment section below.

It seems that agreeing on standard video codecs is not an issue only for real-time communication. Last week, news broke that Wikipedia will be adding video capabilities to its site. However, as a CNET article points out, there still remain some concerns about browser support for the open-source Ogg Theora video codec that Wikipedia has chosen to use.

As someone who has spent innumerable hours on Wikipedia, I am excited to see the website add multimedia capabilities. I can only imagine how much time I will waste now that the entertainment factor of YouTube is combined with the information overload of Wikipedia. For me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of what Patton Oswalt describes as the train-of-thought enabler that is the Internet. You start out looking for information on a given topic, and 15 minutes later, after skipping from page to page, you find yourself reading about something completely unrelated (I once realized I had somehow ended up on a page about the predator-prey relationship between wolves and moose on Lake Superior’s Isle Royale).

Time management implications aside, it is nice to see Wikipedia upgrade to 21^st century technology.  The codec debate is something GIPS is no stranger to, but to see it take place for streaming technology is intriguing.  Similar battles have recently occurred between Blue-ray and HD DVD and Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash technology. The difference here, however, seems to be that there are no clearly defined battle lines. As opposed to the hi-def DVD format war, the Internet poses a much murkier environment for monetization, with fewer entrenched interests supporting a given technology as strongly as they would elsewhere. When consumers have to invest hundreds of dollars on a given DVD standard, and players such as Sony and Toshiba support opposing technologies, a resolution is likely to come quickly. However, open-source options like Ogg Theora are not uncommon for Internet usage, especially for companies like Wikipedia that favor open standards and wish to avoid licensing fees associated with H.264. While Microsoft, Apple and Google all prefer H.264, whether in their browsers or video players, it doesn’t seem too cost prohibitive for browsers to support multiple video standards.

What is perhaps most interesting is that, according to Erik Moller, who is the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the online encyclopedia appears to be more concerned with the ability of users to upload and edit videos than for browser support of playout. This illustrates how the interactive environment of the Internet makes for a more complicated equation for those providing online content, as they have to worry about both suppliers and consumers of video. It will be interesting to see if the open source model that Wikipedia is espousing catches on, with browsers supporting multiple video formats, or if there will be a consensus on a preferred codec that supplies the best video quality with the right features.

We at GIPS are seeing more and more desktop video calls being made as enabled by GIPS customers’ very nice video solutions.  However, adding video to the picture has introduced another degree of complexity in terms of hardware setup and usage scenarios.

When the desktop VoIP breakthrough occurred we saw the same phenomenon, but for the audio devices such as microphones and speakers. Also various versions of Windows created problems. Especially acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) was put to a tough test with the various setups, as a result AEC technology developed to handle the varying scenarios robustly. There is still a problem that the user may need to select the audio devices in Windows, this is something most users don’t know how to, don’t want to know, and shouldn’t need to know.

Last week I got a new Macbook computer, the reason was to get real usage experience to understand our customers’ issues on Macs and help us support our customers better in creating the ultimate end user experience. The Macbooks are apparently very popular for video calling.

Having been a PC users most of my life (my previous Mac experience was that I wrote my PhD thesis on a Mac back in 1995), I must say the Macbook impressed me in many ways.

One of the first things I did was to place a Google Talk video call to our VP of Engineering. I was at home in Stockholm on broadband and he was at home in San Francisco, also on broadband. The call was just perfect and the only thing I had to do was adjust the volume slightly up. The built in camera, mic, and loudspeakers worked perfectly.

I guess the Windows world has some way to go on ease of use.

Yes, I am partial being Norwegian living in Sweden and having worked for Ericsson, but it seems like technology leadership on the wireless side will continue in Scandinavia. The latest example is Tele2 and Telenor Sweden announcing that they are building a joint LTE network in Sweden. Commercial launch is expected by the end of 2010.

All four of Sweden’s leading mobile operators bought spectrum in the 2.6GHz band last year and the three largest have since announced aggressive LTE network rollout plans using the new licences. The third being TeliaSonera which plans to roll out LTE commercially next year.

This is all very encouraging and while Scandinavia is a small market it will provide a testing ground for the new mobile high-speed internet services that LTE should enable.

A big question is what these services will be. The obvious one is extending the success of mobile broadband in Scandinavia by providing faster and better mobile broadband. This is a “dumb” bit pipe service though. The interesting thing is what kind of new integrated services will be enabled on the mobile. I think voice, video, collaboration type services will be big, especially in the enterprise.  Real mobile UC clients and things like GoToMeeting with video on the mobile are examples.

When LTE reaches primetime, the voice and video technology will be there to provide high quality experiences on a mobile handset. GIPS is certainly up to the challenge and working hard to fulfill this vision!

Ahhh, March Madness. It’s one of my favorite times of the year, and I don’t even gamble (office pools are not gambling, just like Joe Lieberman is not a Democrat). Despite witnessing my alma matter, Wisconsin, lose perhaps the ugliest “basketball” game I have ever seen, and the fact that my bracket looks like Iggy Pop after flopping around onstage (picking WVU to go to the Elite 8 was not the smartest thing I have ever done), I have thoroughly enjoyed watching this year’s action. Perhaps the most pleasant surprise has been CBS Sports‘ online coverage.  While the hectic schedule of multiple games ending at the same time can make the TV broadcast maddening , CBS’ streaming coverage makes it easy to follow multiple games simultaneously. To top it off, the video quality is the most impressive streaming technology I have seen to date.

This last feature is courtesy of the new Microsoft Silverlight plugin, which, if what I have seen is any indication, could be a serious competitor to Flash.  It is difficult for me to say how CBS was able to achieve such high quality, but according to the Silverlight Wikipedia page, the Media Stream Source API supports a number of video codecs and can dynamically adjust bit rate to accommodate available bandwidth and CPU. This concept is also incredibly important to real-time audio and video coding, as it allows for maximum quality in the face of changing network conditions.

Another probable reason Silverlight’s video looks so good is that it does not need to approach delay very aggressively, which is a big difference between streaming and real-time applications.  For instance, I noticed about a one minute delay between the online coverage of yesterday’s Marquette-Missouri game and CBS’ TV broadcast. This is perfectly acceptable for most people, especially if they aren’t near a television. However, a one minute delay would render a real-time video conversation completely useless. Thus, a streaming solution is able to overcome packet loss and jitter by simply waiting for all packets to arrive at the receiving end, or even having the sending side resend any lost information, while real-time solutions must employ more clever techniques to maintain video quality while keeping delay as low as possible.

Amir Zmora wrote a great post for Radvision‘s blog today about a recent conversation he had with a stranger on an airplane about video communications. I can totally relate to his enjoyment of being able to discuss IP communications with someone who has no technical knowledge.

Since GIPS does not develop end-user applications, it can be very difficult to explain to a lay person what our company does. This is a problem that is compounded around the holidays when I tend to have quite a few conversations with strangers at parties or family members who I rarely see. It is always nice to see someone’s face light up when I ask, “Have you ever tried Skype or Google Talk?”. From that point on, I can have a great conversation about VoIP or video over IP without ever having to use those terms, let alone mention anything about codecs or jitter buffers.

At the end of the day, that is really what it is all about (that and the hokey pokey). I briefly left GIPS for a stint in a political science graduate program, thinking that I would somehow be working toward something more meaningful to the world at large. I quickly realized, however, that in a small but very real way, GIPS was making it easier for millions of people to be able to communicate. I came back to the company satisfied to know that our technology was improving people’s lives.  While we might not necessarily be saving the world, I think that is something everyone in our industry can be proud of.

Improved Communications for All

Stratecast, a division of the business research & consulting firm, Frost & Sullivan released its technology predictions for 2009.

The team developed its views on current and future trends in specific areas of research focus where they examine the trend and its implications on the industry and market participants.

Some of the noteworthy predictions include:

“The migration to VoIP and SIP will continue despite the economic downturn. That die is cast: new telephony equipment is VoIP-based and expertise in managing traditional voice systems is fading from the enterprise by attrition. It is becoming more expensive to resist VoIP than to embrace it.

The application is king. As enterprises increasingly depend on remote and bandwidth- rich applications, total “application performance” will supersede standalone “network performance” metrics. CSPs will offer “application-aware” network services and management tools, and end-to-end SLAs will become standard.”

Video (unicast and multicast) network infrastructure will continue to be enhanced through faster channel changes, integration with mobility, and feature enhancement through mobile devices.

Advertising will be a battleground

While aggregate ad spending is likely to decrease 5 percent to 10 percent year over year, IPTV operators, MSOs, and mobile operators will all duke it out for pieces of this shrinking pie. The mobile and IPTV operators are relative upstarts, for whom advertising revenue will be incremental to traditional revenue streams. The MSOs will be playing defense.

Consumer Spending Shifts

Consumers will not only cutback as a result of the recession, but consumers will reallocate scarce budgets. Consumer spending on entertainment will shift from out-of-home categories like amusement parks and theaters to in-home categories like video rentals. Consumers will also reallocate telecommunications budgets, accelerating POTS erosion. Consumers will tighten belts when it comes to monthly fees.”

It will be interesting to see how these predictions play out in the market, so I look forward to reviewing these forecasts later in the year.