Fully Networked Car workshop 2010

ITU, ISO and IEC are organizing the 5th edition of The Fully Networked Car workshop (FNC-2010), which focuses on information and communication technologies (ICT) in motor vehicles, bringing together specialists in the field of ICT in cars, from top decision makers to engineers, designers, planners, government officials and regulators.

Information relating to the workshop is available on the ITU-T website.

Sky to launch 3D TV in 2010

On July 30, Sky announced that it will launch the UK’s first 3D channel next year. The channel will offer a broad selection of the best available 3D programming, which is expected to include movies, entertainment and sport.

The service will be broadcast across Sky’s existing HD infrastructure and be available via the current generation of SkyHD set-top boxes. To watch 3D, customers will also require a new '3D Ready' TV, which are expected to be on sale in the UK next year.

Google to acquire On2 Technologies

On2 Technologies, Inc. and Google Inc. jointly announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire On2, a leading developer of the VP video compression technology.

VP6 has established itself as the de facto Internet video standard through its inclusion in Adobe Flash Player and JavaFX. Hundreds of web video portals, user generated content, and social networking sites use VP6-based Flash for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. VP8 is reportedly able to outperform the industry-leading H.264/AVC video compresison standard.

Under the terms of the agreement, each outstanding share of On2 common stock will be converted into $0.60 worth of Google class A common stock in a stock-for-stock transaction. The transaction is valued at approximately $106.5 million. The transaction, which is subject to On2 stockholder approval, regulatory clearances and other closing conditions, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009.

FP7-ICT-2009-5

The 5th call for proposals of the European 7th Framework Programme on Information and Communication Technologies has been launched on 30 July 2009 and will close on 26 October 2009 at 17:00 (Brussels local time). This call has a total budget of € 732 000 000.

More details at the CORDIS page.

YouTube 3D experiments

TechCrunch reports that YouTube is currently experimenting with 3D videos. To have a demonstration click on this link, then you will be able to see a video and to select the "3D viewing style" you prefer.

EU digital dividend consultation

In a consultation document recently published and available at this link, the European Commission says consumers have high expectations for the future development of broadcasting, such as increased choice, high definition, and mobile television and broadband. To achieve this the Commission is proposing that all DTT receivers sold after January 1, 2012 should at least be as efficient as the current H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. The Commission believes that this measure would generate a critical mass of high quality TV equipment in Europe, in advance of the deployment of the related network infrastructure that will make full use of this increased transmission capacity. Taking into account an average renewal time frame for set-top boxes and TV sets of 5 to 8 years, such a coordinated move would also alleviate the typical "chicken and egg" issue that is encountered when Member States are migrating from the first generation of digital broadcasting networks to a more advanced one.

LED backlight leads the way

Declarations of Bob Scaglione, Senior VP of Marketing at Sharp:

"We believe LED is the future," Scaglione said. "We have very aggressive plans to integrate LEDs (light-emitting diodes) in our entire HDTV product line. Sharp plans to be 100 percent LED. By 2011, the entire Sharp product line will feature LED-backlit displays."

"OLED is something we're watching very carefully," Scaglione said. "Although it won't be affordable for at least 5 to 10 years from now, all of the displays showing off the technology are beautiful. But based on price, it's prohibitive. OLED has an opportunity to be a contender, but for the foreseeable future, it's LCD with an LED backlight that will lead the way."

Read the full story on CNET.

Silverlight Smooth Streaming

The new version 3 of Microsoft Silverlight is already available, earlier than expected. Silverlight 3 introduces major media enhancements like out of browser support allowing Web applications to work on the desktop; significant graphics improvements including perspective 3D graphics support, GPU acceleration and H.264 video support and many features to improve development productivity.

One of the most interesting new features is the Smooth Streaming technology (see a demo here) which dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file delivered to Silverlight based on local bandwidth and CPU conditions. This provides support for Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) streaming.

The technical overview tells the following:

IIS Smooth Streaming uses the MPEG-4 Part 14 (ISO/IEC 14496-12) file format as its disk (storage) and wire (transport) format. Specifically, the Smooth Streaming specification defines each chunk/GOP as an MPEG-4 Movie Fragment and stores it within a contiguous MP4 file for easy random access. One MP4 file is expected for each bit rate. When a client requests a specific source time segment from the IIS Web server, the server dynamically finds the appropriate Movie Fragment box within the contiguous MP4 file and sends it over the wire as a standalone file, thus ensuring full cacheability downstream. In other words, with Smooth Streaming, file chunks are created virtually upon client request, but the actual video is stored on disk as a single full-length file per encoded bit rate. This offers tremendous file-management benefits.