Video is not only emerging in a garb of bits and bytes that enable new interactive services, but is expanding its reign from living rooms to shirt pockets. Not only is video going to be networked by cable TV providers and telcos as Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), but it will travel with us in handhelds.

Various standards are already battling to deliver digital content to mobile phones. The European Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) encapsulates content within IP and offers a throughput of 10Mbps, but requires handsets to access a separate network for video. The Terrestrial-Digital Mobile Broadcast (T-DMB) standard, which delivers 1Mbps throughput, uses spectrum already allocated in most of the world. The Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (MBMS) might be preferred by mobile operators because it allows business models similar to the ones currently in use. There are also two main contenders for video compression—the H.264 and VC-1 (based on Windows Media 9).

Whatever the standard, the 3GSM World Congress held last February in Cannes has given itself a deadline—June 9, 2006—to bring television to mobile phones. A number of trials running high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) protocol over W-CDMA have been successfully conducted by equipment vendors like Ericsson and Nortel and operators such as mmO2, Orange and Vodafone. In favor of DMB, South Korean company TU Media Corp. has been beaming seven video channels via satellite to mobile phones since May 1.

The challenge in making video portable lies in doing so without any significant degradation in battery life, increase in form factor, reduction in video quality consumers are used to (at 30fps) or increase in manufacturing costs—and, of course, in supporting the wide variety of standards.

A few companies have either developed or are currently developing silicon in answer to design challenges. For instance, Philips Semiconductors will introduce a receiver/demodulator for DVB-H in an SiP by the end of 2005. The company claims power consumption will be less than 40mW and the SiP will measure 9-by- 9mm. Another company, DiBcom, claims that the combined power consumption of its demodulator and Freescale's DVB-H tuner is close to 40mW.

However, design challenges remain for system engineers who need to choose from standards, silicon and embedded OS. To address these challenges, the Embedded Systems Conference—Taiwan (ESC-Taiwan) to be held July 27-28 at the Taipei International Convention Center has called three companies to present their take on "Designing Video into Tomorrow's Consumer Applications" in a forum by the same name.

At the forum, you will learn about STMicroelectronics' media processor architecture and standardized software application layer that address the need to support a wide range of video formats, target applications and digital rights management. Faraday Technology Corp. also recognizes similar challenges and will discuss a scalable, multicodec architecture to meet demands placed on the resolution and frame rate under a variety of bandwidths and video streaming formats.

MontaVista, on the other hand, will examine how the combination of CPU capabilities, system software and middleware plays a role in achieving design goals with limited resources. They will focus on the new Linux kernel 2.6 and its enhanced multimedia capabilities.

I look forward to seeing you at the ESC-Taiwan as you learn and share know-how on making video ubiquitous in consumer devices.

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