Sumitomo Electric Industries, SEI Networks, NEC and NTT-BB will launch a field trial to measure the effectiveness of forward error correction (FEC) in improving the delivery of video content over residential connections. Currently, broadband content providers use packet re-transmission techniques to recover from packet loss.
The FEC technology used for this trial was developed by SEI Networks based on the "Raptor" technology of Digital Fountain, a start-up located in San Francisco. Forward error correction provides a means for receivers to repair lost packets. Users participating in the trial will be provided an IP set top box developed by SEI Networks. The trial gets underway in December and is expected to run through the end of January 2004.
http://www.sei-networks.com/index_E.htmlhttp://www.nec.com/
- Digital Fountain's Meta-Content technology analyzes and then represents each content file as a series of unique mathematical equations. The equations are transmitted instead of the original content bits, enabling the receiving computer to reconstruct a perfect copy of the original content. Digital Fountain said the unique advantage of its technology is that all users can be treated as a single group, meaning that server capacity is no longer a strict function of the number of users. The company claims that in multicast environments, a single Fountain Server could provide unscheduled access to a virtually unlimited number of users. In a unicast network, Streaming Fountain supports up to 4,000 video streams at 700 kbps quality , 10,000 video streams at 300 kbps quality, or up to 60,000 narrow-band streams.
Digital Fountain is led by Cliff Meltzer, who previously served as Senior Vice President of Cisco Systems' IOS Technologies Division, where he oversaw development and marketing of IOS. The company was co-founded by Dr. Michael Luby, previously a computer science professor at both the University of Toronto and University of California at Berkeley, and Jay Goldin, formerly a management consultant with the Pacific Rim Consulting Group in Hong Kong and China.
