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After all it�s about the content, right? Your video content will be coming to you, deliverable on all of your favorite devices, when you want it, in the format and in the state that you�d expected it to be. Imagine the following simple scenario; I start a movie on my mobile phone or WiFi (News - Alert) device on a train ride home from New York. When I arrive at the station I pause the movie, get into my car, drive home and then pick up the movie from where I left off on my 50� plasma TV!
Yes, it is a cool idea but it also makes perfect business sense. (I know a few carriers will be interested in this when it really arrives.) Long form content, movies in particular, are great time fillers for travelers. Mobile devices like PDAs, mobile phones, mobile Internet devices (Sony�s new WiFi-connected Mylo for example), and some mobile feature phones are all targets for MobileTV and long form content such as movies. Content providers and operators alike are very interested in offering this type of premium content to subscribers.
Problem statement
The main problem with long form content is that it is long form. Would you pay $7 to see only 75 percent of an exciting new release movie? Of course not. We also all know that today�s content delivered to mobile video applications are siloed, or vertically integrated, with the application. Worse, the content provider is not in anyway connected to your home cable provider. This is a real opportunity. But how do you address the application and infrastructure silos that surround the content? How do you bridge them in real time to enable the delivery of premium content without the subscriber having to do a triple somersault?
Enter IMS
The IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert), if used and programmed correctly by the application developer, will enable just this type of multimedia delivery. It will also enable the general statement made above about delivery of content to any device in any format. An operator that provides both mobile video and has thorough content agreements with, say, a cable operator, might be able to pull this off. The recent announcement in August by Sprint (News - Alert) and Time Warner regarding expansion of previous voice agreements comes to mind as an example. However, this article is more about content and content delivery and its importance than about how IMS works to perform the magic mentioned above. I�m very careful here to state that IMS enables the delivery to the IP device.
Content Technology Required
The technology that is not yet clearly standardized is the part surrounding the actual content storage, management, ingestion, indexing, formatting, DRM insertion, and physical delivery. These technologies exist today and are different from vendor to vendor (for example, NMS has its own Content Subscriber Management, transcoders, etc.). There is also a market need, based on the cost of content stored in various formats, to be able to store it in one format (its digital representation defined by a codec type) and, in real time, deliver that content to subscribers in whatever format they desire. Sticking to video, the most likely scenario is storing or receiving the live video feed in MPEG-2 (the current codec standard for a D1 TV channel, but this is a moving target going toward MPEG-4 and H.264) then transcoding or transrating it (either converting to another codec type or not changing the codec but reducing the screen format size and bit rate) in real-time to MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, proprietary
formats like Windows Media and RealVideo. In addition you�ll need to add in some form of DRM to support license requirements. If it sounds complicated now, these are just the parts required to take video content and deliver it to a target device, not the ones that track the device and figure out where you are in the movie.
It�s early, especially where the market is in its evolutionary cycle for delivery of combinational video services, the type where my movie is deliverable by both my mobile operator and my cable guy and they both have a way to get paid. A common and interoperable IMS infrastructure between the mobile and cable operators is required, and video solutions that can interoperate across it is what�s needed to deliver on the promise of video content delivery to a device near you! IT
Mike Katz is director of product marketing for NMS Communications. For more information, please visit the company online at www.nmscommunications.com (news - alerts).
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