“Twenty years ago the idea that a cable company would be buying NBC was shocking,” was a salient quote during an interview with Fujitsu VP Keith Dunford and Erin Sun the Senior Marketing Manager at the Content and Communications World event in NYC collocated with SATCON 2010. A theme of our discussion was the competition forming between broadcasters, cable companies and telcos. Dunford made the initial quote above and continued to explain how content creators are driving the industry more due to the advent of broadband and the Internet.
Similar to how IP is dramatically altering the telephony space, it is causing incredible changes in the market for content creation and distribution. Consider for example another point made by Keith – 30 years ago all TV was delivered over the air and going forward just 10-15% of it will be.
And as this transition takes place the company sees a move to higher fidelity content which in turn means higher bitrates and higher performance networking and compression.
One of the products displayed by the company at the show was the IP-900, a $10,000 real-time HD/SD content H.264 encoder capable of delivering SD at rates of 400 Kbps – 2 Mbps and HD between 5-8 Mbps. The company says the box will reduce the streaming bit rate by about 50% over MPEG-2 while maintaining video fidelity. Obviously this savings can add up quickly over satellite connections.
Here are some of the other features of the box – rear view shown at top:
- High Performance H.264 encoded content over IP networks at low data rates
- Dual encoders provide two independent HD streams or independent HD/SD streams for Simulcast
- Rugged, lightweight 1RU half-rack width design
- Low power for mobile and transportable applications
- Region-of-Interest Processing – Provides Best Picture Fidelity
- Less than 400ms encode-decode latency
- Data Stream Protection with Advanced FEC/ARQ
- Auto-sensing 10/100/1000 Ethernet Output
