Let’s talk about a new technology that one of its true believers says will revolutionise the way we watch streaming video, video-on-demand and Internet TV, using a broadband connection. It’s called H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC (Advanced Video Coding).

What’s so sick about H.264, sick in this case, meaning it’s good, as my teenaged daughter taught me? It is a digital video codec standard which can achieve very high data compression, says Nandan Kundetkar, an inventor and director of the Singapore-based SPL Innotech.

According to Wikipedia, H.264 was written by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as the product of a collective partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10 standard are technically identical. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May of 2003.

"What H.264 does is that it compresses data and content like music and film to a very high degree, thereby ensuring that when that the content does not occupy a lot of space in the pipe," says Mr Kundetkar, whose company SPL Innotech supplies H.264-enabled set-top boxes. SPL Innotech recently tied up with Goldstone Technologies, a Hyderabad-based firm, for supplying the boxes using which Goldstone will be beaming television programming via broadband to NRIs around the world, beginning with Mauritius next month.

H.264/AVC creates a standard that would be capable of providing good video quality at "bit rates that are substantially lower (e.g., half or less) than what previous standards would need (e.g., relative to MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), and to do so without so much of an increase in complexity as to make the design impractical (excessively expensive) to implement".

"An additional goal was to do this in a flexible way that would allow the standard to be applied to a very wide variety of applications and to work well on a very wide variety of networks and systems," it says. Mr Kundetkar said the H.264 contains a number of new features that allow it to compress video much more effectively than older standards and to provide more flexibility for application to a wide variety of network environments.

Iceland on top

Iceland has emerged at the top of the list of countries with the highest broadband penetration, displacing South Korea. According to a new report by OECD, Iceland had a broadband penetration at 26.7 per cent in 2005, compared to South Korea’s 25.4 per cent. Even more impressive is that in 2001 when South Korea had 17.2 per cent broadband penetration, Iceland’s penetration was at 3.7 per cent.

Aiming to expand its customer support base in the country, software firm Autodesk plans to add three more facilities, establishing its business in six places in India.

"We definitely are aiming for expansion. Last few quarters, we have received great response from the manufacturing as well as the media sector. We are giving priority to set up facilities for providing better-equipped and time efficient customer support service," Autodesk regional head Rajiv Nair said here.

However, Mr Nair clarified that no timeframe had been fixed for implementation of this expansion plan. The design software and digital content firm, known to the manufacturing sector for its designing software Autocad, at present, has presence at Mumbai and New Delhi, besides its countries main office in Bangalore.

The firm is also planning to enhance its manpower strength to 80-85 from present headcount of 60. "At present, we have a headcount of around 60... considering the projected manpower needs and expansion programme, we would be adding around 40 per cent of this strength this fiscal," Mr Nair added.

Autodesk had recently announced opening of its first Centre for Excellence in the country, at Sir J.J. College of Architecture in Mumbai. The firm, which has expressed the need to equip country’s new generation of architects with advanced 3D-model based design capabilities, is also planning to come out with another such centre in the manufacturing sector.

Under the initiative, the institute plans to set up two advanced computer laboratories with total of 50 high end machines, would see students of the institute get an opportunity to learn Autodesk’s designing softwares.