When our select group of European i-mode content providers met Aquacast's CEO Makoto Shimizu last week in Tokyo we were all greatly impressed.
Mr Shimizu is impressive himself, with his international experience as a senior executive, and his technical knowledge. And in Aquacast he has assembled what he believes is a new generation of content+technology providers for the mobile industry. With a background in intelligent vehicle systems his vision stretches out to streaming video auto communications services by the year 2010 (an element of 4G).
Aquacast is intensely focused on the moving image, in service content plus advanced technology to produce and deliver fast, low price, high quality video.
Aquacast has also invested heavily in rapid site production tools and technology. Mr Shimizu was proud of of recent efforts where they went from the first concept demonstration to a production site in 5 weeks.
In addition to carrier-branded services, Aquacast offers non-carrier versions, which is where Shimizu believes that the most money will be made. From 2004 to 2005 he forecasts a 10X increase in mobile video and a 10billion yen market segment in Japan by the end of 2005.
This comment caused a pregnant pause in the collective group, and then a flurry of questions about the carriers' business models. More precisely - how did they plan to make money when they had flat-rate data plans?
The group was keen to know because everyone was thinking about opportunities to collaborate and to bring Aquacast to other countries.
At this point Mr Shimizu gave us the biggest surprise of the meeting when he declared that DoCoMo would be charging for video and that it would be "circuit switched". It will not be included in the flat-rate.
This comment stopped us in our tracks for two reasons, firstly beause this marketing strategy took is by surprise, and secondly because we couldn't understand how this worked technically. Perhaps we misheard. We checked, ask the question in a different way, yes for sure, circuit-switched on the 3G network!
The business model is surprising enough, leading to the thought that perhaps DoCoMo is having second thoughts about its flat-rate plans as its makes the transition to the FOMA 3G service.
On the technical side, a little reseach shows that it is indeed possible and within the UMTS 3G standard:
To address the challenge of delivering two-way live video to 3G mobile handsets the 3GPP chose to adopt the ITU-T standard for delivery of two-way video over wireline networks and rename it 3G-324M (“M” for mobile).
Why they chose this standard over other approaches, such as the commonly used IP streaming technology, relates directly to the quality of the end user's experience. 3G-324M provides a low-latency, circuit-switched mechanism to deliver video data to the 3G-enabled mobile video handset. This is a clocked interface that carries the video data at 64 kbps and delivers it to the MSO via standard T1 or E1 trunks. One advantage of using the 3G-324M standard to transport video data is that it only requires a limited amount of bandwidth.
3G-324M also begins transmitting data as soon as it receives it, and defines the set of video codecs and signaling that is required to make a functioning, end-to-end, two-way video connection. In contrast, reliably sending video using IP requires more network bandwidth than when using 3G-324M - typically 4 to 6 times the bandwidth required to send the same video stream over 3G-324M.
- for more information see this excellent article from NMS Communications.
What's unusual, is that DoCoMo have chosen to use this method for video streaming, as against the raison d'etre for the method which is focused on two-way video connections.
Besides, H.324, the standard from which 3G-324M is adopted, is an almost superceded technology - by SIP which is rapidly becoming the technology choice for multimedia / real-time communication session control throughout the Internet and within next generation wireless networks.
The challenge for SIP and all IP-based protocols is how to turn an inherently asynchronous network into a pseudo-synchronous one for the purpose of quality of service and network load management. Hence the huge amount of work that is going on in such areas as MPLS and "virtual circuit" solutions that bring ATM network transport service benefits into IP networks for voice and video.
Perhaps the choice of circuit-switched video is more an insight into the commercial forces at play within DoCoMo than a mere consideration of technology?
- for more on the DoCoMo/Fujitsu V-Live implementation see here.
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