TelcoTV: Envivio delivers on mobile TV promise

ANAHEIM, Calif. – Envivio formally announced here at the Telco TV show that its 4Caster C4 Encoder for MPEG-4 video has passed Microsoft Mediaroom’s conformance testing, adding it to the Microsoft ecosystem. But perhaps more impressive than the announcement was the company’s demonstration of support for MPEG-4 video over PCs and mobile phones.

Envivio is proud of its compression roots, having been a division of France Telecom that included the original engineers that founded the Motion Picture Experts Group, said Ian Locke, vice president of global communications for the company. “We have taken compression beyond IPTV,” Locke said. “The C4 is supporting multiple mobile formats as well as computer video.”

The emphasis is on multiple formats. For video on the PC, Envivio is supporting Flash, Quicktime and Windows Media Center, while for mobile devices, Envivio supports up to eight different profiles on a single device.

“A serious Tier 1 operator who wants to do mobile video has to be able to support a wide variety of formats because as the [available] bit rate varies, you must be able to support the format that will maintain the picture,” Locke said. Envivio supports live bit-rate switching, which enables the selection of the appropriate mobile video profile for the end user’s given circumstances.

“There will be a scalable video codec in the future, but it’s not here yet,” Locke said. “We are working on it with other people as well, but maybe in five years, you can deliver mobile video with just one codec. Until then, you need profiles. If I’m watching a video on my mobile device and I suddenly go into a tunnel, the device needs to switch to the profile that will give me the most bandwidth in that situation.”

Locke believes mobile video today is much better than it’s given credit for by an industry that wasn’t enamored of the early versions of poor quality pictures. “The video today is beautiful,” he said. “There are three things that we think are driving profitable mobile video services: good content, acceptable quality and reliability.”

Orange uses Envivio to support its subscription mobile video service, which delivers linear mobile video at two different quality levels – 6 euros for basic and 9 euros for what Orange calls high definition – and has 1.4 million subscribers, Locke said. That is not an on-demand service but a mobile TV channel, he adds.

“We are still trying to figure out PC TV – it may be a bump-up on a triple-play service, where customers will throw in a couple of bucks to get that also,” Locke said.