Video over IP Technology and Market Trends
Legacy video signals are based on analog technology. They are carried via expensive transmission circuits. We now, however, live in a digital world. Through advancements in digital video compression composite audio and video signals can now be carried over typical network circuits both on the LAN and across the WAN, and even over the Internet. Video over IP or IP Streaming Video are newer technologies that allow video signals to be captured, digitized, streamed and managed over IP networks.
The first step is the capturing of the video content. This can be accomplished via several means. The content is processed, compressed, stored and edited on a video server. The content can either be “live” (captured and processed in real-time) or pre-recorded and stored. These transmissions can then be sent via the network to either one or several stations for viewing singularly or simultaneously. The viewing station will need either a hardware or software viewer or in some cases both. Emerging applications provide the viewer and video over Java with no special requirements on the end station.
Video presentations can be grouped into three categories: Video Broadcasting, Video on Demand, and Video Conferencing. Of the three, only video conferencing is full duplex, the others are essentially one way transmissions. These video over IP transmissions are scalable, cost effective, and very flexible. These new business tools bring disparate offices together on one enterprise and are being deployed rapidly. According to The Gartner Group, IP video applications will be utilized in 80% of Fortune 2000 companies by the year 2006. The applications are rapidly replacing the legacy ISDN video conferencing applications. According to In-Stat/MDR (March, 2003), video conferencing endpoints are expected to reach US$875 million in sales in 2007, and the video conferencing services total is expected to reach US$5.5 billion in the same year.
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