Post a Comment
Commentary: Cost effective digital video is ready to change lives
-- Electronic Business, 8/8/2006
By Guillaume Coffinier, portable media player marketing manager, Texas Instruments
The arrival of cost-effective digital video technology promises to change our lives in the same way. Certainly, digital video is a different medium than audio. For example, video isn’t as practical as audio for people who are jogging or operating heavy machinery. However, the immediate availability of video through the use of a portable media player (PMP), no matter where a person is, opens the door to innovative new applications we have only begun to explore.
The opportunity for the video market is tremendous, as evidenced by the explosive growth of the digital audio market. Today, consumers can choose from literally hundreds of different audio players. Many of these high-end players have color LCDs, the ability to display a wide range of image formats and a limited form of video playback. Already consumers are getting a taste of what they can do with portable digital video, and they want more.
The market for portable video-enabled player has peaked at about two million units shipped in 2005, according to Joshua Martin of IDC. However, as the market begins to understand the different ways digital video can add value to consumer applications, these figures will increase dramatically. In fact, the total market for portable video-enabled player is projected to be 22 million units shipped by 2008, IDC estimates.
One of the factors limiting the growth of this market is the lack of available video content. Part of the reluctance of content owners and providers to release video content involves copy protection. Digital rights management (DRM) will play a key role in the growth of the digital video market, because there needs to be a balance between deterring theft and deterring consumer usage. Significant effort has been expended on developing a DRM infrastructure for digital audio, and digital video content providers may be able to build on this infrastructure, rather than having to start from scratch. As a consequence, the video market can avoid many of the stalls that hindered the audio market in the past decade.
In the same way, the video market also will be able to leverage the search infrastructure developed for locating media content on the Internet. Yahoo! and Google, for example, have already launched video search services. Even–more–advanced search engines, such as Blinkx TV, which uses voice recognition to profile news broadcasts and other content to make video “searchable” are under development.
Video will not necessarily cut into the audio market. It actually may increase the amount of content users consume. Users have limited disposable income, and they also have limited disposable time. Making audio more portable has enabled consumers to increase the amount of time they spend listening to music. The same applies to video, and portable video actually opens up the opportunity to convert underused time–the five minutes spent here and there waiting in line into an entertainment experience, most of which can be tied to a revenue stream.
Eight ways portable video will create new appsDigital audio is different from video in many respects. It is in these differences that digital video will establish entirely new applications and markets that do not currently exist for the audio market.
1. Consistent demand. Consider that when a band releases a new song, a majority of listeners will listen to the song multiple times over a period of weeks to months. In contrast, digital video has a much shorter shelf life, so to speak. Viewers are much less interested in watching a video clip again than they are in seeing the next installment or episode. Thus, the video market has more of a driving factor to it. Bands come out with new material every six to 18 months. Video release schedules are often weekly and sometimes even daily. The demand for video content must be sustained, but it also produces a consistent, predictable and potentially highly -profitable revenue stream.
2. High immediacy. Video content also has a high-immediacy value, and this is one area in which portable digital video adds significant value for consumers. For example, watching the Super Bowl as it happens is essential to viewers. Although the ideal viewing experience of an event, such as the Super Bowl, is at home in front of one’s HD home theater, something substantial and important is lost if the game has to be recorded and viewed hours after it has occurred. The ability to view the game as it happens, no matter the location, even on a lower-resolution screen connected to the Internet via a wireless connection, is more important than the quality with which the game is viewed.
3. Time-shifting. One of the most popular features enabled by digital video is time--shifting. Instead of having to watch a show at the specific time it is broadcast, consumers are able to record video for later playback. This feature was first enabled by VCRs, but in a much cruder form. VCRs tended to be difficult to program, and users had to manage physical tapes, as well as the risk that they might overwrite a program they had not seen yet.
On-screen guides have greatly simplified the video time-shifting process. They also have enabled time-shifting that’s a lot more subtle. For example, viewers can “pause” broadcast video while visiting the kitchen for a snack and then resume playback without missing a second. They achieve this by recording the broadcast video while it is paused, and then playing back the recorded portion while continuing to record the live feed. As a consequence, they never miss any part of a show. In fact, time-shifting enables other useful features, such as live instant -reply, that were never possible before.
4. Video anywhere. Today’s higher-end cable and satellite set-top boxes let consumers easily record and time-shift video. What they fail to enable is the ability to watch the video somewhere other than in their living room or bedroom. For example, a family going on a long drive or on a trip where they will spend a few nights in a hotel is limited to the DVDs they own or to the limited on-demand – and expensive– movies made available by the hotel. Additionally, the longer the family is away, the more video collects on the hard drive, making it difficult to catch up with more than one or two shows after the trip is over.
With a portable media player, consumers can download time-shifted shows for playback wherever they happen to be. Downloading a stored show to a portable media player lets consumers play content back over a vehicle’s video system, through a hotel TV or on the player’s LCD screen if no other screen is available. A personal video recorder (PVR) plus PMP system allows fans to watch what they want, when they want and where they want, provided they have the rights associated with the files to be played.
5. Choices galore. PMPs allow several people in the same room to watch completely different shows. In a hotel room with a single TV, for example, everyone has to agree on the show or movie. More often than not, not everyone is completely satisfied. With PMPs, consensus is no longer essential. Everyone can watch what they choose without imposing on the others. The selection of what to watch becomes completely personal.
6. Broadband freedom. Consumers will also have the option of downloading their favorite shows and movies over a broadband connection, rather than having to wait until they get home to catch up. This can be done from a hotel room or a WiFi hotspot. This way consumers will have ultimate freedom in how they experience video. If they choose, they can wait until they get home to watch their favorite show in the comfort of their own living room or bedroom. However, they also have the choice of watching that same show in a hotel room, in the car or wherever they happen to be. Widespread broadband availability coupled with WiFi makes it a realistic scenario for a consumer to download a live video stream while exercising at the local gym or riding the subway-- definitely a revenue stream for content providers and business owners.
7. Automatic delivery. When video can be played back anywhere at any time, how and when it is delivered becomes less important. Consider a scaled-down version of a popular show appropriate for PMPs that is made available immediately after the initial HD broadcast. A user could automatically configure a home computer to download the show and then upload it to a PMP the next time one is plugged in. Other than making the initial subscription purchase, a consumer would never again have to think about having the show available on the portable player.
8. New breed of content. One of the most exciting areas for digital video content creators is the aggressive demand that will arise for shorter-length programming. The majority of opportunities for watching video do not lend themselves to getting deeply involved in a feature-length movie. Even half-hour programs exceed the available time for many of these viewing opportunities.
Cost-effective video
Advances in silicon manufacturing and software development technology have brought down the price and complexity of digital video to a price point where it has become feasible to introduce video to a wide range of consumer and embedded applications. In fact, many of the barriers to deploying digital video are no longer relevant. Consider the following:
1. Up-to-date standards support. While standards and formats continue to change at an ever-increasing pace, programmable digital signal processor (DSP) architectures provide a flexible foundation for keeping designs up-to-date in a timely and cost-effective manner. Even existing products can be field-upgraded, guaranteeing users that their media players will be able to play all of the latest content.
2. Standards transparency. With standards being supported through software, users no longer need to concern themselves with the particular format in which a video clip is stored. If a player doesn’t currently support a standard, it can download the appropriate codec automatically, all without distracting the user with confusing download and update options. In this way, users will be able to look at their video as content, not as files that must be managed.
3. Cost-effective reuse of silicon resources. Programmable architectures also promote reuse of silicon processing resources. ASIC-based architectures, for example, require a separate hardware block for each standard and mode supported. The more standards and modes an ASIC supports, the larger and more expensive the chip will be. Fully programmable architectures, such as the ones provided by Texas Instruments, can exploit the same processing resources for each standard, keeping device cost and complexity down.
4. Availability of a display. It used to be that the cost of a video-quality LCD was enough to eliminate video as a possibility in many applications. Today’s PMPs, even those that support only audio and limited image playback, all have a good-quality LCD. In these devices, the incremental cost of adding video support is low. Note that other components critical for the successful adoption of portable digital video, such as USB and WiFi connectivity, are already part of existing players.
5. Limitless connectivity. Connectivity to PMPs also has ceased to be a concern. With the near-ubiquitous availability of WiFi and USB, users are able to connect their PMPs to PCs, set-top boxes and even other portable players. Through a PC or set-top cable box, users can connect to every playback and storage device on a home network, as well as to the Internet and all of the content available over a broadband connection.
6. Ease of design. DaVinci™ technology, from Texas Instruments, begins the migration of digital video away from being a complex subsystem that developers must spend months developing to becoming a drop-in system-level component. With this technology, developers can introduce digital video to almost any application without having to program a DSP or become a digital video expert. Through the use of industry-standard APIs, developers are able to work with digital video at the application level. All specific implementation details–such as the particular encoding format;, whether video is a live, real-time stream delivered over the Internet or stored on a remote hard drive;, and whether the display is a large HD monitor or a small, handheld LCD–are taken care of by low-level drivers available out-of-the-box.
As the technological barriers to digital video continue to drop, the video market is poised for extremely rapid growth. Leveraging the existing digital audio infrastructure, the mechanisms for delivering and protecting video content are in place. Connectivity options, such as USB and WiFi, simplify the movement and management of multimedia content. And with continuing advances and innovation in system-on-a-chip manufacturing, it is only a matter of time before consumers will be able to pull video out of their pockets like they used to take photographs out of their wallets.
