Worst possible traffic load meets huge market opportunity - and a synthetic roadblock
Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with all of the major constituencies in the in-building wireless video space, and the level of competition is as great as the market opportunity – which is to say very great indeed. Streaming video is, of course, the most challenging traffic for any LAN, wireless or otherwise – large, time-bounded data objects, with many opportunities for but also little tolerance for errors in transmission that almost always will degrade the viewing experience. With users expecting and growing more familiar full-HD 1080p-class images, the importance of getting video right only grows. And the opportunity here is huge, from basic streaming to a mobile PC to eliminating the need for wires altogether in the most sophisticated home-theater and corporate environments. Even the carriers – wired and wireless – have a strong interest in wireless video distribution – but note I’m not talking about broadcasting here. More on that later.
There are four key technology players in the WLAN/limited-range video market today, just as there was a few years ago when I last wrote on this topic. Back then we had plain old Wi-Fi (mostly .11g), ultra-wideband, Amimon‘s early efforts, the first inklings of 60 GHz. from SiBeam, and ultra-wideband (UWB), which subsequently fell off the list, partially because the key supplier of UWB video links, RadioSpire, went out of business, and partially because UWB itself has fallen short of being able to provide high throughput and otherwise suffers from range limitations. The new fourth member is the work being done at the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), which competes directly with the current SiBeam-led effort, WirelessHD. But each of these four options offers its own unique spin on the wireless-video opportunity:
– WirelessHD – The first products based on specs from this consortium are now appearing, like this somewhat pricey adapter from Best Buy’s house brand, RocketFish (cool name, that). WirelessHD is talking about extensions that could push throughput to 25 Gbps.
– WiGig – Video isn’t the only thing these guys are interested in. Look for them to make a major contribution to the upcoming IEEE 802.11ad standard, and to maintain a close relationship with the Wi-Fi Alliance.
– WHDI – This is the group commercializing Amimon’s technology. They’re taking more of a software tack today, embracing a wide variety of platforms with excellent video quality.
– 802.11n – Good ol’ .11n, I think, will be one of the biggest winners in this contest. It’s fair to point out that video over .11n will need to be compressed; I really don’t think this is a problem for most people. I’ve seen excellent HD-quality video delivered at 8-20 Mbps, and I think, especially on smaller screens, that one can go way lower than those rates and still see a great picture. There are also specialized approaches using 802.11n, like, for example, ProVision Communications, who base their technology on the proven H.264 standard. Just for fun, check out the odd wording in this EE Times story on them- a “range of up to 400 years”? Wow, I didn’t think the time part of space-time coding was that important!
All of these solutions work quite well (I’ve seen them), but the biggest question in my mind is just how much video bandwidth we really need. The 60 GHz. guys, who are building truly remarkable technology here, are forced into so doing by the fact that the DRM guys insist that digital video be protected from illegal copying (a/k/a theft) to the greatest extent possible. So, we render Blu-Ray, for example, in the Blu-Ray player, thus ending up with on the order of 1.5-3+ Gbps on HDMI. Wow, that’s technically amazing, but totally unnecessary and completely the wrong strategy for a contemporary, network-oriented video solution. We should be essentially ripping at the source and rendering at the destination – building high-performance graphics chips (which are, BTW, dirt-cheap these days) into the TV or projector, for example. Data loads go down, and we eliminate the silly compressed vs. uncompressed arguments that ultimately only have value because the DRM loonies are still on the loose.
The only effective way to deal with DRM is via public executions, figuratively or not depending upon local customs and culture. For once and for all, content does not want to be free, and such an ethos is tantamount to an endorsement of outright theft. Thievery has been and always will be a cultural problem, and technological solutions to cultural problems are (a) seldom effective, (b) often expensive and a waste of resources, and (c) primarily serve, ultimately, to irritate the law-abiding or at least the ethically-unchallenged. We need to build solutions that solve real problems, not technology that compensates for an ineffective social contract. Just my $.02.
Finally, I’ve just completed a real-world testing project involving digital video distribution in the residence that I think you’ll find interesting. More on that shortly. And more on all of this later this year.
