The world of media processing is changing. It has to – the media it is processing is changing faster than a New York City fashion model.
Media processing, which is how media streams are directly manipulated, encodes and decodes so that networks such as service provider networks can give you all that great YouTube, Netflix and personal video content. It also handles conferencing and other forms of rich media.
While mostly understood by providers and not the enterprises and consumers that actually use services based upon it, media processing is growing in the area of mobile, such as the aforementioned video, but also in Web, file sharing, and even machine to machine (M2M).
And this growth is driven by the explosion in data consumption in all these areas.
The reason providers need leading edge media processing isn’t just to keep pace with data consumption, but at the same time ensure the user experience remains high.
Emerson Network Power makes it its business to understand these issues, and support that quality of experience.
One area Emerson sees media processing supporting is HD voice, which can move across IP networks. Anyone who has battled early IP phones or the first iterations of Vonage knows voice over IP isn’t always so great. So imagine if HD voice can knock the socks off what we get over POTS? It would be a revolution.
And this high quality voice could make our smartphone calls as crystal clear as an Ernest Hemingway declarative sentence.
But rich media and HD voice take up a lot of bandwidth, and truly task processing, forcing media processing technology to keep pace. This technology has to compress larger and larger streams, and at the same time process them so they move quickly across the net. Take HD video for instance. This uses nearly six times the bandwidth of standard TV (which is why your DVR now fills up so fast).
And now tablets and smartphones increasing support HD, and end users are demanding that HD content.
Cutting through the Complexity
If all this sounds complex, it is. Fortunately, TMC recently hosted a Webinar entitled “Raise Your Voice: Accelerating Media Processing in IP Networks” to make sense of this all.
Here Webinar sponsor Emerson looked at how next generation network applications will have advanced services such as WebRTC and Voice over LTE processed.
“The rush to LTE across most mobile networks is being driven by a demand for data services. But LTE is a data-only architecture, so support for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) over the IP data path is crucial to ongoing success. The enhanced bandwidth of LTE also presents opportunities for both mobile operators and so-called over-the-top (OTT) service providers to expand service offerings beyond standard voice into high definition voice and real time interactive chat and video services,” Emerson explains. “The architectures used to access communications services are evolving too, with the emergence of WebRTC, and cloud-based network function virtualization (NFV) expected to revolutionize service delivery architectures.”
The webinar, led by Brian Carr, strategic marketing manager for embedded computing at Emerson Network Power, instructs attendees on how to support these advanced applications through equally advanced media processing.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
