Why is this a Mobile story you ask? Well, one of the convergence encoding channels is Mobile – Envivio’s 4Caster C4 Now Supports video compression for all Three Screens of consumer video – (HD) TVs, PCs and mobile devices – on a single platform.
This means that your multi-play operators (of which there are a fair few now) can offer content simultaneously across the full range of Mobile, Home, and Internet appliances.
As the press release puts it:
This new release of the 4Caster C4 adds support for high definition encoding, as well as 3GPP and 3GPP2 mobile streaming profiles for unicast mobile TV. These new features join the product’s existing support for quad channel standard definition encoding for IPTV and quad channel VGA and QVGA encoding for Internet TV. Having all compression operations performed by a single, flexible encoding platform offers operators significant capital savings and operational efficiencies.
The 4Caster C4 is a high-availability hardware platform with an ultra-flexible embedded software encoding core that enables customers to alter the compression capabilities of the encoder as needed with a simple software license key. This unique compression architecture offers levels of service flexibility and encoding performance upgradeability not possible with traditional hardware-only encoding platforms. Encoding performance can be upgraded with each software release without the need to buy and install new hardware. Operators can even entirely transform an encoder’s usage, effortlessly changing resolutions, codecs and bandwidths without the need for a hardware change.
This is a serious bit of kit! I want one! Now!