SPIRIT DSP Announces Significant Upgrade to Voice & Video Engines
A global study of the broadband market by Point Topic has found that value-added services, such as Voice Over IP (VoIP), added almost 37 percent to the basic broadband subscription during 2010, and generated $60 billion in revenue for vendors with total value-added service revenues increasing from $48.8 billion at the end of the 2009 to $57.5 billion at the end of 2010. Point Topic estimated that VoIP is the most valuable service, with VoIP revenues running at a rate of just over $17 billion at the end of 2010, with 120 million VoIP subscribers. According to a recent report by International Data Corporation (IDC), the global videoconferencing market saw an increase of 24.3 percent year-over-year in Q3 2011. Improvements in technology and better overall networks can be attributed to this growth.
«There’s a profound and growing demand for inexpensive, high quality and feature-rich IP-based communications from businesses and consumers alike,” said SPIRIT DSP’s Product Marketing Director Alexander Samarin. «Simply put, more people are doing more things via their broadband connections, but there’s no longer room for a ‘good enough’ experience. Apple, Google and Skype did their job perfectly in promoting quality video calling to billions of people, however, their services still miss the mark on cross terminal compatibility and a unified high quality user experience, which is extremely critical for communications. Nor do they provide efficient team collaboration tools for businesses. Service providers and solution developers must get to market quickly in order to deliver on the promise of high-value, high-performance, cross-platform communication solutions in order to gain and retain customers. With our TeamSpirit platform, new communication startups gains millions of users in months, while the traditional carriers get the ability to retain and expand their services’ user base with their own LTE/IP-based OTT/VAS services featuring HD voice and video calls for consumers and SaaS video conferencing/collaboration for their broadband business users.»
The new versions of SPIRIT’s TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engine Mobile, TeamSpirit Conferencing Server Engine and TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engine PC (version 3.2.2) include the following upgrades that translate to a more rapid time-to-market for SPIRIT customers that develop cross-platform voice and video calling applications and services, as well as a better Quality of Experience (QoE) to their end users:
— Support for the new versions of Apple’s operating systems iOS (5) and Mac OS X (10.7) and dozens of new Android handsets.
— Support for Google’s open source video codec VP8, offering compatibility with Google’s and other open source products and eliminating expensive royalties associated with the standard MPEG H.264 video codec.
— Improved loss protection for video stream, delivering even better quality across all networks.
— Increased performance (Frames Per Second) of H.264 video, improved rendering with Android’s OpenGL ES video and decreased media delay for voice and video calls for a better user experience.
— Increased productivity of mobile users, allowing videoconferencing on multiple mobile platforms with several participants.
— New APIs for camera switching, arbitrary viewports, image mirroring and device orientation, offering the ability to develop more sophisticated video calling applications with a better UI.
— Virtual camera interface for custom video streaming from mobile devices, offering new usage scenarios for end users.
— An expanded set of SDK examples for easy integration and faster time to market.
— Improved AEC (Acoustic Echo Cancellation) technology that delivers better performance and sound quality on mobile devices.
Samarin continued, «Quality across all platforms and time-to-market has been the driving force behind the massive uptake of our TeamSpirit engines, and we’re proud to announce this latest version, which offers an even more sophisticated and rich plug-n-play API that is unparalleled in its ability to help our customers quickly deliver on the promise of anytime, anywhere premium-quality IP calling services.»
The TeamSpirit Engines are SDKs for real-time IP calling/conferencing communications, allowing business application developers and service providers to offer superior quality communications products to millions of global users. The TeamSpirit engine software uniquely combines scalable echo- and noise-free audio with scalable video, a necessary marriage to ensure the highest quality conferencing experience. TeamSpirit enables many hours of battery life in wideband talk mode. The voice engine includes highly optimized standard voice codecs and a patent-free wideband, error-resilient scalable SPIRIT IP-MR voice codec (IETF RFC 6262). The video engine includes SPIRIT’s H.264 scalable video codec that is able to adapt streams to each peer’s network and PC environments without heavy transcoding, and it includes a multi-component stream protection module that compensates for network jitter and packet loss.
For more information, visit www.spiritdsp.com.