Putting the squeeze on HD

Coming late to a market is not usually a sign of innovation, but as Thomson makes a U.S. push with its SmartVision IPTV system, the global video company is banking on doing things better than the existing players.

Its two primary advancements are the market's lowest bandwidth requirement for delivering high-definition television (HDTV) and the ability to support both IPTV and mobile TV off the same middleware platform. Thomson also is featuring a user portal both for service configuration and parental controls.

There is no doubt, however, that Thomson, while successful in France and elsewhere, is coming late to the U.S. market — in part because of adjustments the company made to the system to enable it to comply with emergency alert systems and other North American-specific requirements.

To make a splash, the company is promising to deliver HD content at only 4 Mb/s using MPEG-4 compression. By comparison, AT&T, using Microsoft IPTV middleware, Alcatel-Lucent network equipment and Cisco video gear, is delivering HD using MPEG-4 at 6 Mb/s.

“We are bringing an end-to-end solution that is based on the [MAD] Mustang chipset, which enabled us to get more use out of the MPEG-4 tool sets and deliver HDTV at 4 Mb/s,” said Mark Marinkovich, director of market development in North America for Thomson.

The end-to-end solution features headend gear such as HD ViBE encoders, on-demand technology, a service management platform to organize content and manage services, home gateways, and both standard-definition and HD set-top boxes.

“We can deliver six HD streams in 40 Mb/s” over bonded copper or three streams over an ADSL2+ link, Marinkovich said, adding that 4 Mb/s “is as low as we can go for the foreseeable future.”

Other vendors, notably Cisco Systems, have indicated an ability to hit the 4 Mb/s mark in the lab, if not yet in the field.

Thomson's SmartVision system features a wide set of interactive features, from a personal video recorder to video-on-demand to metadata searching. It also can generate what looks like a 20-channel mosaic to enable viewers to see what's happening on 20 different channels. To the network this appears to be one channel, to ease the bandwidth crunch, Marinkovich said.

“We have a mosaic generator that can take several MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 streams and mux them together so it looks like an individual channel,” he said.

The Thomson management system also will manage its mobile TV option so that service providers who want to do both fixed and mobile IPTV can use a single system.