As Korea was preparing to launch it's mobile video broadcasting services, I visited to understand the state-of-art and present HP's development in 3G video.
The best host in Seoul is my colleague Sung-Man Yoon who manages to do teleconferences, take care of his charming kids and run through a hectic program. Sung-man.yoon@hp.com
Sung H Park, President CEO FeelingK
I met also David Kim, Director Business Development to discuss fun call scenarios (probably best implemented later using 3GPP R05 for mid-call session establishment). FeelingK is one of the developers on HP’s OCMP media platform focusing on video portal solutions.
Kyoung-yong Jee , Researcher, ETRI
I attended his presentation at ExpoComm on terrestrial T-DMB wich has just been launched in May (1 test emitter).
Specifications :
. video = 5” 352x288x30fps H.264;
. audio = MPEG4 BSAC;
. spectrum =174-216 MHz .
Applications :
.5 TV channels + location data services.
. Voice control (ASR) Voice
EPG (XML) program guide.
Streaming text / images for advertisement.
On their demos I spotted an amazing 3D screen with polarized displays. Right frame encoded with ½ resolution. The whole thing is muxed / demuxed.
Joon-Mo Koo CEO, M Cube Works
I also met at their office Tony Oh planning and marketing , Yonho Chang , COO platform and services; Joon Ho Chang , Server development manager; Albert Kim Planning and marketing. Theie main product XEPEG works with SKT June and KDDI mobile VoD and S-DMB. Specifications :
. Video= MPEG-4, H.264 Baseline
. Audio=MPEG-4 AAC +
. Clients for ARM, Intel, TI, licensed to Qualcom and Nokia.
Young Soo You, Director Kicos
Very kindly invited me for lunch and gave me insights. Currently focused on radio and other innovations but took notice of my 3G video interest.
Pixtree
A visit at the Korean broadcasting exhibition to see the DMB infrastructure.
PixDMB-E100H encoder
. Video MPEG-4 part 10 AVC / H.264 Baseline Profile L1.3; CIF, QVGA, QCIF 1-30 fps
. Audio MPEG-4 part 3 BSAC
. Mux MPEG-2 part 1 / MPEG-4 part 1
PixDMB-P100 player
MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, BSAC decoder
USB-T-DMB receiver (~10x3 cm)
Jin-Sung Choi, SVP mobile communications R&D, LG Telecom
Discussed specification of handsets . Feature phones with video are 52% of shipments in 2004. Currently H.264 / MPEG4 decoding, moving to H.264 coding and MPEG7/21. DMB handset. Besides video, LG focuses on music with a download service musicON and phone clients. Competes with SKT music service but covers all service providers.
Sangho Chae, R&D manager for applications SKT
Also met Lee Joong Yun, application development team at Amiga. Amazing presentation of NATE 3G services. 2005 wireless data ARPU is 21% = 28$/month and 3G (1xEV-DO) subscribers generate 2 X ARPU compared with 2.5G. All phones support MPEG-4 QCIF 8-15fps, AAC, G.723.1; Current phones H.264 QVGA, AAC+, AMR, EVRC. For DMB, electronic program guide links back to NATE URL for back channel activation.
We discussed extensively environments that would mix SMIL and Video. SKT does not see text/logo inserts being the solution as the software in handsets is SMIL based and so are WAP clients. What is needed is client software that would control video frames in the right window. On the Macromedia Flash Lite they would like to see a royalty-free (or low) licensing. Agreed to send an e-mail with HP thoughts on the topic (Scott McGlashan, Paul Burke and others).
Seungho Lee, R&D manager Softeleware
And Michelle Park mjpark@softeleware.com Service business manager Softeleware is one of the developers on HP’s OCMP media platform focusing on video portal solutions.
Minnie Hong, manager business team, Thinmultimedia
TMI provided m-VoD to SKT (1st generation), Reliance, Cellcom, TIM, T-Mobile USA. TMI is also ASP for SKT
. thinAV client for ARM9, TI OMAP, STM and Symbian, Java, Brew OS – 17 million installed base
. Video MPEG-4 , H263 , H.264, TCM3*, TCM4*,(* proprietary) SQCIF, QCIF, QQVGA, QVGA
. thinsserver : download and streaming, content management
. thiin Creator : PC authoring tool 1-35fps all 3GPP 3GPP2 formats
Services :
VoD, MoD, monitoring (phone cam), advertising, 1:1 / 1:M chat,
Philipp Hyung-Seok Han, Manager Marketing Nextreaming
Nextreamer™ server for 3GPP/3GPP2
.Video MPEG-4 visual SP L 0-2; H263 P0, P3 L10,45; H.264 Baseline P L1b
. Audio MPEG-4 AAC Low, MP3; HE AAC (AAC+)
. Speech AMR-NB, WB, 13K QCELP, EVRC
. Transport RTSP
. RTP interleaved RTSP/TCP
. Other .3gp, .3g2, .mp4, .k3g
. HPUX, WinXP, Solaris 2.7, Linux Redhat 7.0 kernel 2.2.1
Kevin Kim, Director, Global Product & Partnership Widerthan.com
Ztango is now part of Witherthan USA and has partnership with Verizon for ring-back tones. The focus is on music services e.g. MelON at SKT. They see musical video ring-back a natural extension of this in 2006.
