Market Background
Consumer Market Trends
The rush for advanced technology in the home has created technology-savvy consumers who demand more and more features and quality to enhance their digital home experience, driving abundant opportunities for new consumer devices.
Three key technology trends in the last decade have greatly contributed to and enabled the average consumer to expect the availability of information and to easily move data of all kinds, especially video data around at work or at play.
Monthly service charges have fallen to affordable consumer rates, the network infrastructure continues to expand to accommodate a larger subscriber base, and ever increasing data rates and bandwidth are made possible to keep up with consumer demand. Service providers of all kinds from the large telcos and MSOs to small independent operators are all vying for a piece of the consumer broadband pie. A highly lucrative and growing revenue stream is made possible due to the growth of numerous existing and emerging applications that require high bandwidth or low latency data transfers, ushering in the era of voice, video and data (triple play) services.
The shifts in consumer usage model of a single PC in the home, to multiple PCs in the home, to multiple connected consumer devices in the home has been enabled by the many technology options available to the consumer for networking their home. The concepts of the digital home or the digital living room have been brewing for the last decade, and continue to be a key video application for consumers. Home networking technologies have been improving in reliability to provide the ultimate experience in video data sharing within the home.
The mass market acceptance and continuous enhancements of technologies such as 802.11x and WiMAX wireless have greatly enhanced the mobility of workers as well as home users. The proliferation of low power, portable devices that can communicate wirelessly has exploded to the point of enabling new usage models for consumers, moving people from being tethered to a machine in one place to expecting to be able to take their data anywhere, any time. The infrastructure can easily accommodate low bandwidth data communication; however with improvements in wireless reliability coupled with advanced video compression techniques such as H.264, high bandwidth video transfers are becoming more and more in demand on portable devices.
From Content Consumption to Creation
With the enabling of consumers having ‘always on’ broadband access, the ability to easily share the data and being able to take this data always on the go, consumers are not only becoming data and voice enabled but also now highly video enabled. Triple play services, with deployments starting in Europe and Asia and moving quickly to the US, are now fast becoming the norm.
Consumers are rapidly moving from simply consuming video content (watching their broadcast or recorded video through set-top boxes, iPods, portable media players (PMP), or Digital TV) to creating their own content (video blogs, Google/YouTube, video-enabled cell phones, etc.). This content creation is only going to increase as we start seeing new applications that make it possible such as video telephony, IP-based remote monitoring, or location free TV. The always connected and tether-free consumer will also expect to continue to be able to share, stream and store all of this created video content with as much ease and reliability as they are used to with data.
Early adopters have been satisfied initially with low quality, low resolution, and low frame rate video services particularly as the network or technology had not been able to keep up with the high bandwidth, low latency requirements of video. It was ‘good enough’ to be able to even use video to start. However, for the mass market consumer, and as the consumer market technologies continue to expand, the unforgiving average consumer will expect at minimum the high quality of video that has been available on DVDs, or ‘DVD-quality’ video, particularly for paid subscriptions. Furthermore, with the rapid transition from Standard Definition (SD) video to High Definition (HD) available to consumers, they are starting to see the benefits of a new level of video quality.
The consumer demand for more video channels, more video services and more video quality is a continuous cycle. As more content becomes available, more video services are offered and as the video quality is expected to be great everywhere, consumers will want more and more. Broadband, network and wireless bandwidth continue to improve and the price of storage continues to drop, helping the video explosion, however they are not increasing fast enough. A shift from sending 1 video stream to x video streams requires an x-fold improvement in bandwidth capability. The move from SD resolution to full HD resolution generates 6x+ the amount of video data for just 1 stream of video alone.
Clearly video compression has been the answer to addressing the bandwidth and storage needs of video data. Video compressions standards and technologies have continued to improve in the last few years to enable more complex standards to be achievable at consumer price points while allowing the consumer the availability, mobility and high standard of video quality they are used to. The mass market acceptance of new and advanced video compression standards is an ever evolving need, fueled by the continuing market advances in bandwidth, networking, wireless, video content generation, storage and ultimately consumer demand and expectation.
Advanced Video Compression Will Not Stand Still
The baseline video quality for the last few years has been unquestionably ‘DVD-quality’ or MPEG-2 based compressed video, where an average two hour movie can be stored on a standard 4.3GB DVD disk. The rapid acceptance of MPEG-4 (ASP) compression has allowed a significant bandwidth and storage savings that has enabled the ubiquity of new consumer devices. Devices such as PVR/DVR set top box appliances, portable media players (PMP) or video iPod devices and lower storage video playback on digital still cameras and digital camcorders, and applications such as video-on-demand (VoD), video streaming or multi-media messaging, have all taken advantage of the MPEG-4 revolution.
The next generation compression standard is now H.264/AVC also called MPEG-4 Part 10, another significant jump from the MPEG-4 Part 2 offering with the baseline standard already integrated into 5th generation Apple video iPods and iTunes, as well as Quicktime 7. The next jump in standard definition compression is moving to H.264 Main Profile, which offers a 30% efficiency improvement over H.264 baseline.
A comparison of the bandwidth, storage and download performance can be made between each standard.
Performance comparison for a 90-minute DVD-quality movie*
|
MPEG-2 |
MPEG-4 (ASP) |
H.264 (baseline) |
H.264 efficiency compared to MPEG-2 |
H.264 efficiency compared to MPEG-4 |
Bandwidth Required (Mbps) |
3.0 |
1.8 |
1.1 |
63% |
38% |
Storage Utilization (MB) |
2025 |
1234 |
727 |
64% |
41% |
Download Time (Minutes) |
386 |
235 |
139 |
64% |
41% |
* Download time at 700kbps
Every new standard raises the bar in mathematical complexity and hence the difficulty level in achieving a solution that is cost-effective and consumes low power. Consumers continue to be cost sensitive yet demanding in their needs and will simply not latch onto the latest trend if it does not meet their requirements. For a company such as Qpixel, the challenge is finding the ultimate balance in enabling the highest level of quality with important features needed, while keeping costs and power low. Furthermore considering the nature of the consumer market, the right market timing, and maintaining the optimum level of flexibility is also crucial in catching the consumer market wave for digital video devices.
Qpixel’s current shipping H.264 Main Profile products successfully meet or exceed the consumer needs and achieve the optimum balance for mass consumer acceptance.
