New video compression technology really delivers

The CIO-level business angle on the latest tech

Call it the YouTube Phenomenon. People have voracious appetites for watching video over the Internet. My kids can be entertained for hours on end by watching humorous videos online. And I confess, I have a weakness for watching Web-delivered episodes of 30 Rock when I need a break.

But video over the Internet is still in its infancy. And just like we forgive a toddler who misbehaves in public because he can’t help it, we also forgive the short-comings of video delivered over the Web. Short-comings like long lead times for loading the video. Jaggy, jerky presentation from time to time. Pauses at unexpected times to buffer more content. Small screen display. The problems are all a direct result of bandwidth limitations.

But there’s good news on the horizon. A recent technology advancement by Broadcast International and IBM may change the way we view broadcast video. In mid September, the two companies demonstrated a joint solution for video compression that vastly reduces the amount of bandwidth required to transmit broadcast-quality video. The announcement comes at a time when new sources of content are proliferating and the number users and devices that demand that content is skyrocketing.

Broadcast International has developed and patented video compression software, called CodecSys, which reduces bandwidth needs by more than 80% for HD-quality video over satellite, cable, IP and wireless networks. CodecSys achieves its breakthrough performance through an open architecture that uses artificial intelligence to analyze a video stream and select the codec best-suited to a particular video frame or sequence from an entire library of codecs.

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Call it the YouTube Phenomenon. People have voracious appetites for watching video over the Internet. My kids can be entertained for hours on end by watching humorous videos online. And I confess, I have a weakness for watching Web-delivered episodes of 30 Rock when I need a break.

But video over the Internet is still in its infancy. And just like we forgive a toddler who misbehaves in public because he can’t help it, we also forgive the short-comings of video delivered over the Web. Short-comings like long lead times for loading the video. Jaggy, jerky presentation from time to time. Pauses at unexpected times to buffer more content. Small screen display. The problems are all a direct result of bandwidth limitations.

But there’s good news on the horizon. A recent technology advancement by Broadcast International and IBM may change the way we view broadcast video. In mid September, the two companies demonstrated a joint solution for video compression that vastly reduces the amount of bandwidth required to transmit broadcast-quality video. The announcement comes at a time when new sources of content are proliferating and the number users and devices that demand that content is skyrocketing.

Broadcast International has developed and patented video compression software, called CodecSys, which reduces bandwidth needs by more than 80% for HD-quality video over satellite, cable, IP and wireless networks. CodecSys achieves its breakthrough performance through an open architecture that uses artificial intelligence to analyze a video stream and select the codec best-suited to a particular video frame or sequence from an entire library of codecs.

A codec is a program that compresses and/or encodes a video signal for transmission. Most codecs are "generalists." In other words, they try to deal with every type of image that comes at them, whether it's the fast motion of a basketball game, an explosion in an action movie, or rapidly moving flood waters on the weather channel. The problem is that you need a specialized codec for each of those types of visuals, if you want those images to be compressed without losing image quality. Otherwise, they just take up too much bandwidth.

By automatically switching to the expert codec that has been specially designed for each of those types of visuals, CodecSys is able to compress those images efficiently without losing image quality, thereby conserving critical bandwidth. Since this process is very compute-intensive, CodecSys utilizes the IBM multi-core Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor to speed it along, so that it appears to happen instantaneously to the human eye.

The Cell/B.E. processor design features a central processing core based on IBM's Power Architecture technology and eight synergistic processing elements (SPE). Cell/B.E. "supercharges" compute-intensive applications like the CodecSys video encoding, and it’s often used to enhance performance for computer entertainment and handhelds, virtual-reality, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows and other "image-hungry" computing environments. If you’ve ever played a game on a Sony PlayStation 3, then you’ve experienced the power of Cell/B.E.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.