Bits By B.I.T.: Is Instantaneous Large-Screen HD Video Over the Net Here?
So you’ve got a 24-inch screen now for your PC. And you’re thinking of buying an Internet-connected 40” HDTV for your living room.
But you can’t get any decent full-screen HD movies or TV shows, yet. Either the pictures are fuzzy or they break up along the way or both.
Try this. Hit the start button on the left.
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This is not an embed from YouTube or Hulu or any existing Internet video or TV site. It’s a movie trailer running on a self-contained player, from Business Internet Technologies, a video compression marketing firm with offices in Las Vegas and Portland.
Like the high definition and smooth movement? Then go here and hit the icon on the far right to enlarge to full screen. Still clear images and motion, even in action sequences.
Their point?
High definition shows, prerecorded or live, are possible on the Internet, at sizes that compete with images and sound delivered over the air or over a cable. And that the shows, movies and live events can be delivered to PCs and Macs, set-top boxes like Tivo or Vudu or even those from cable operators such as Comcast and Cox.
What B.I.T. has wrought is a compression technology that takes a wholly different approach to squeezing pictures and sounds and sending them back to screens, according to Sean Wrought, the company’s chief technology officer.
In its encoding scheme, the audio and video of a show or other program are separated into separate files, then synched up frame by frame.
If there is no audio frame to match with a video frame, the video frame is dropped. If, on the other hand, a video frame is missing, it replaces the frame instantly, using motion and image estimation.
But the piece that “turbo boosts” its compression technique is its incorporation, Wrought says, of CUDA drivers from NVIDIA, the visual computing company whose technologies power video game consoles, workstations, personal computers and mobile devices.
This accelerates the video processing, Wrought says, and the results are integrated into the encoding of the audio and video streams, as they are recompiled.
In practical terms, this now makes it possible, he contends, to do “better than real-time encoding” of high definition imagery. Which will make it possible to broadcast sporting events live – or new TV shows, as soon as they go what used to be thought of as “on the air.”
Right now, the company believes it can support more than 100,000 simultaneous large-screen users of high-definition programming with its existing servers and encoders. It has a base set of servers in Phoenix, associated servers in Germany and the Netherlands and three more server nets in the United States.
Wrought is confident that can be scaled to handle millions of simultaneous users, using Akamai and other services, which makes it possible for programmers to think of the Internet as a serious alternate means of deploying prime time shows and events.
He’s been at it for more than six years, to get to the point you see here, which is the first public display of the B.I.T. encoding technology. His past include reverse engineering work in the U.S. Air Force and at Sony. His partner is Bob Korman, who co-founded MEGA Systems & Chemicals, Inc., a semiconductor equipment company that made the Inc. 500 in the '90s. The pair have had some success in video search marketing with an affiliate of B.I.T., pg1search, which by this rankingis one of the five best firms in optimizing content for video search engines.
But: Live, big screen, no-latency high-definition pictures over the Internet, right now?
You be the judge.