Envivio 4Caster C4 Encoder Powers Bouygues Telecom Mobile TV Service

Envivio Inc. announced that its 4Caster C4 video encoder is being used by Bouygues Telecom, one of France's largest mobile network operators with ten million subscribers, to encode video for its TV 3G+ mobile video service. The Bouygues Telecom video headend is hosted by Cognacq-Jay Image, the content management and delivery subsidiary of TDF. TV 3G+ provides subscribers with access to more than 60 channels in a variety of standard and premium packages.

When launching the new service in November 2008, Bouygues Telecom and Cognacq-Jay Image elected to replace their legacy software encoders with the 4Caster C4 hardware encoder configured for Mobile TV. The multi-profile 4Caster C4 enables the TV 3G+ service to be optimized for the 176 different handsets currently in use by Bouygues Telecom subscribers. This includes a QVGA resolution, 3.5G HSDPA profile to deliver premium video quality for subscribers with high end devices.

“4Caster C4 from Envivio has helped us by delivering the reliability and performance needed to provide a good quality of experience for the end user, as well as flexibility that is enabling our company to follow the fast-moving mobile market.” said Thibaut Keraval in charge of Mobile Services Solutions in Bouygues Telecom

“Upgrading the existing infrastructure to an up-to-date Envivio platform was an important decision in the development of TV 3G+,” said David Karoutchi, Business Development Manager – Mobile & Broadband, Cognacq-Jay Image. “The 4Caster C4 provides a high reliability, high performance foundation that offers the superior service levels we were looking for in order to ensure the best experience for subscribers.”

The award-winning Envivio 4Caster C4 simultaneously delivers four channels of video with up to 32 different Mobile TV profiles per system, providing an advanced compression platform for operators launching new services or upgrading early generation services based on software encoding platforms. The Bouygues Telecom deployment also includes the Envivio 4Manager headend management system, providing M:N automatic redundancy configuration for true carrier-grade service availability. This transforms mobile TV into a full-fledged service offering, based on a state-of-the-art professional headend infrastructure.

New Envivio 4Caster C4² Encoding/Transcoding Platform Boosts Performance

Envivio, Inc. introduced 4Caster C42, the second generation of the company’s Convergence Series video encoding/transcoding platform. 4Caster C42 uses the performance of the latest generation Intel multi-core server processors to deliver better quality video, make more efficient use of bandwidth and enable delivery of high definition (HD) video services to all three consumer screens. The 4Caster C42 joins the 4Caster C4 in the Convergence Series, building on the features of its precursor and giving service providers flexibility to tailor their video headend to match their requirements.

“The competitive pressure to deliver more entertainment options, to more subscribers, at the best possible quality, continues to mount,” said Envivio CEO Julien Signès, “yet bandwidth remains precious. 4Caster C42 drives performance and flexibility far beyond platforms based on ASIC hardware. As a result we can offer significant improvements in both video quality and bitrates. By simultaneously supporting multiple networks and many different consumer devices, 4Caster C42 enables an operator to meet the highest consumer expectations–including top quality HD service—on any viewing screen.”

The enhanced performance of 4Caster C42 extends the capabilities of the codec technologies developed by Envivio to further enable delivery of the best quality video within the tight bandwidth tolerances of different networks and applications. The new Envivio Extreme HD compression is exclusive to 4Caster C42 and enables operators to deliver a best-quality HD experience to IPTV subscribers using just 4 Mbps. For Internet TV, even lower bitrates are possible and can be combined with adaptive bitrate technologies such as Silverlight Smooth Streaming HD, Flash HD and Apple adaptive streaming to enable quality delivery over networks with no guaranteed QoS. 4Caster C42 supports all Envivio compressions levels for IPTV, Mobile TV and Internet TV.

Intel engineers have incorporated specific video compression routines submitted by Envivio into the IPP library of the latest generation Intel Xeon processors. The C42 compression engine benefits from these optimizations which provide the performance needed to deliver high quality HD video for the most demanding network scenarios.

In addition to the comprehensive suite of pre-processing tools found in 4Caster C4, the new 4Caster C42 leverages its increased processing power to add support for H.264 over IP input as well as spatial de-noising filters for HD content that corrects visual errors from HD video sources.

Envivio Announces SilverLiveTV

Envivio Inc., announced the immediate availability of the first complete encoding and Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected distribution solution optimized for Microsoft Silverlight 3. Designed for evaluating, developing and deploying premium live and on Demand video services, Envivio SilverLiveTV™ provides operators and content owners with a comprehensive solution for delivering high-value, feature-rich video entertainment to consumers.

SilverLiveTV enables operators to offer PC and Mac users multiple channels of video content over wired and wireless networks. It ingests analog or digital sources and simultaneously encodes and encrypts the content using Envivio’s video processing enhancements and DRM interfaces. Advanced Quality of Service management maximizes reliability and ensures consumers a great viewing experience. Embedded Microsoft Windows Media and Silverlight DRM, powered by PlayReady content protection, guards the entire lifecycle of high value streamed content from the head-end to the consumer device over IP networks.

“Demand for entertainment, particularly premium-caliber services, on PCs and mobile devices is steadily increasing,” said Steve Sklepowich, group product manager for Silverlight at Microsoft Corp. “Envivio encoders and their support for the advanced features of Silverlight 3 enable operators and content holders to pursue the benefits of delivering these services to consumers.”

Envivio to Enable Higher Definition Mobile TV

Envivio Inc., the leading technology provider of IP video convergence encoding solutions from mobile to HD, today announced that the performance of its award-winning 4Caster M2 mobile TV encoder is to be enhanced significantly with the addition of Extreme Compression. As the global market-leading encoding platform for Mobile TV, the 25 percent increase in performance made possible using Extreme Compression on the 4Caster M2 will have a profound impact on the quality of mobile broadcast and 3G mobile streaming services around the world. Operators with both new and existing H.264 based Mobile TV deployments which use the 4Caster M2 will be able to provide subscribers with a dramatically enriched quality of experience.

Envivio's Extreme Compression supports numerous advanced features for H.264 Baseline profile encoding. New spatio-temporal adaptive rate control and an enhanced rate distortion optimization algorithm deliver significant performance improvements at the low bit rates used for Mobile TV. A new text and edge detection feature automatically applies compression specific to the text and graphics to make them more legible on smaller screens. Current testing indicates that Extreme Compression will provide additional performance improvements of up to 25% on the 4Caster M2 Mobile TV encoder at the bit rates typically used to deliver DVB-H and 3G or 3.5G mobile streaming services. This will allow Mobile TV operators to provide efficient delivery of high quality, full motion video playback which is supported by the latest mobile devices. Operators can also take advantage of the more efficient use of their available bandwidth to increase the number of live channels on mobile broadcast networks.

"Our in-house codec development team has worked incredibly hard to improve upon the already outstanding performance of the M2 encoder and we are very excited about the results," said Eric Rosier, Vice President of Engineering at Envivio. "By liaising closely with the world's mobile handset vendors and the network operators we have as customers, Envivio has been able to develop an even more efficient mobile TV compression implementation that delivers a truly stunning end user experience on mobile devices that have been designed specifically for multimedia playback."

Envivio's ultra-flexible compression architecture will allow current users of the 4Caster M2 encoder to add the new Extreme Compression capability simply by loading new software code. New software code can be uploaded to 4Caster M2 encoders individually using the built-in web server management interface, or in groups using Envivio's 4Manager NMS, allowing performance to be improved significantly while minimizing the impact on operational services. Extreme Compression will be available on the next software release of the 4Caster M2 encoder and on a future release of the 4Caster C4 encoder's Mobile TV configurations.