by Kent Winter
Vice President of Sales - EMEAA
I watched the Inauguration of Barack Obama. I don’t ever remember watching an Inauguration before. Most people I spoke to about it said the same, and perhaps it says more about technology than Barack Obama (no offence intended). The inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20th proved to be a technical experiment of types.
While nearly two million attended the ceremony, millions more watched on television and for the first time ever, tens if not hundreds of millions watched from their homes or offices on the internet.
While the video was streamed from multiple sources with unrestrained bandwidth requirements to these millions of browser endpoints, the image was generally still limited in size within the browsers. More importantly, most saw what I saw. The audio stream was fairly consistent, but the video was reduced to a series of still images because the internet was full (even with a T1 of bandwidth and people sharing monitors in our office for the event). This led several of us watching on one screen to ask who messed up on the official oath, which we could hear, but could not see a moving image.
While the video was streamed from multiple sources with unrestrained bandwidth requirements to these millions of browser endpoints, the image was generally still limited in size within the browsers. More importantly, most saw what I saw. The audio stream was fairly consistent, but the video was reduced to a series of still images because the internet was full (even with a T1 of bandwidth and people sharing monitors in our office for the event). This led several of us watching on one screen to ask who messed up on the official oath, which we could hear, but could not see a moving image.
It is therefore easy to see the potential impact of unrestrained and unmanaged video on the 3G network if unrestrained video is downloaded to browsers and media players on phones. The network quickly fills up and cell towers fall……
This is one of the key arguments in APEX’s video solutions. Given the relatively small size of the video screens on the telephones, video is best delivered to a phone using a video call which offers the consistent quality of a voice call while not taking any more bandwidth on the network than a common voice call.
As people around the world strive to see more of the world through video, the phone will become a more and more popular and necessary medium to watch. 3G video, using the Next Generation Video technology, such as the APEX SDP’s IVVR and Video Telephony technology will become the best and most reliable way to provide video in a world of ever increasing viewership and bandwidth requirements.
