Compression: Technology, Need Continue to Grow - Page 4 of 4

Where Next?

Compression technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, and this evolution is critical to keep up with the expected demand from broadcasters who will need to make sure they can meet the demands of end users. "We have made a lot of progress with AVC compression in the last five years," says Braydon. "We are still in a fairly steep part of the improvement curve. We have seen improvements of 20 percent per year in bit rate for the same quality. That will flatten out, but we are still several years away. MPEG-2 took 10 years to go flat. With AVC we are still seeing quite a lot of improvement. The main players in the business are working very competitively to outdo each other, and we’re focusing on making in compression technology and will see substantial gains for the next few years."

Hobbs sees potential gains of 10 percent or more on bit rate efficiency or video quality with MPEG-2. "There are not huge amounts of improvements to be made, but there are some if someone wants to replace their encoding infrastructure if one wants to replace tens of millions of set-top boxes in the field," she says. "MPEG-4 is very much a new technology. It has only been in commercial use for four or five years. If you think back to when MPEG-2 started, it was making rapid improvements in its first five or 10 years. So we are expecting to see the same thing in MPEG-4. We are on second-generation MPEG-4 encoders, and there was marked improvement. As we move to third, fourth or fifth generation we will continue to see substantial improvement in MPEG-4, certainly for the next five to 10 years," she says.

"I don’t think we are at the limits, but I think advancement are going to dramatically slow down," says Szelag. "Now that we are in the digital age and going from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, I think it’s going to be a number of years before we see any great leaps. Now the big advances are going to be in the delivery mechanisms and getting the content out." Hildeman also identifies equipment as the biggest limitation to continued compression advances. "I think the limit is in the hardware on which software-based encoders such as Streambox are deployed. The better and faster the processors and chips are, the higher the quality of video and the faster the transmission," he says.

Comtech is focusing its efforts on the physical layer of the technology, says Enns, who sees a business in replacing hardware that already is becoming obsolete after three or four years. "We are approaching the best we can do in terms of the physical layer. That’s why so much attention is given to the link layer and the application layer to see what can be done in other areas to provide better experiences," he says.

"From the compression standpoint, it’s going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing the human eye to see how much of original content can we throw away until a majority of viewers around the world are going to see that we threw too much away, then they’re going to pull it back," says Szelag. "Costs are not being driven up, but as the demand comes for greater quality in the sense of HD services, bandwidth is increased there, and there always is that fine line. What is the breaking point? How much bandwidth can I use and achieve the best perceptible quality that the customer wants without giving away the farm? Everyone always wants the biggest bang for the buck and the best price. We are all consumers at heart."