MUMBAI: Telcom companies have gone in for broadband on the wi-fi line as revenues from voice calls have fallen, said Shah Technologies' Sujata Dev.
Explaining this trend, Dev said this was because the market was maturing. She was speaking about the merits of digitising content at today’s Broadcast India Technical Symposium.
The broadband roadmap, she noted, starts with infrastructure which VSNL, Tatas, Reliance provide and use. Then there are triple play ports which use ADSL 2+ technology. Then a content delivery network is needed. This consists of servers, routers, set top boxes. Service come in two forms - multi cast and unicast.
In this convergence environment, the PC gets television functionality like films and interactive games. The television can get PC functions like email, internet and video on demand (VOD). The code to be used in VOD is still being debated upon. Right now MPEG 2 is used. Rich media is a must for IP service providers and it is important that compression technology matches it. For the content owner, protection of his offerings is important. There is a revenue sharing arrangement that exists between the content owner and the service provider.
The challenges here are to increase the transmission rate while decreasing bandwidth requirement. There has always been a question: last minute bandwidth availability. ADSL 2+ transmits at the rate of 24mbps. It requires 2.2 mhz bandwidth One the mobile front, revenues in India are expected to reach $3 billion by 2009. One way in which mobile providers can differentiate themselves is through the kind of content that they have. So a creative repurposing of content is needed. The value chain is content aggregation, content repurposing and the customer.
Speaking also about digital cinema, Dev said In India we are yet to see satellite-delivered movies. "This will help curb piracy and shorten the gap between a film's release and its distribution," she said.
In digital cinema a film gets uplinked through a teleport. It is received at different locations. Each location has a Digital Light Processor which is a computer based system. Frame by frame processing happens and then binary bit streams go onto the screen. A system like this can also be used for an ATM operation and cyber gaming, Dev noted.
