Converged media technology company Skitter Inc. says it's filed a provisional patent application for Prioritized VBR, which brings variable bitrate video streaming to multicast IPTV and Internet TV environments, providing customers with improved video quality and more reliable IP delivery, and giving providers greater control over quality of service.
The Atlanta-based company said PVBR technology is now available in the second generation of its Acclaim family of live MPEG-4 video encoders. Acclaim video encoders are a part of the end-to-end Skitter.TV hybrid IPTV/OTT video platform, and can also be used as a stand-alone solution for live streaming of Web video and in other IPTV installations.
"Prioritized VBR is a new method of streaming video that maintains the compression benefits of variable bitrate video while still being able to transport the streams as if they were compressed in a constant bitrate," said Mark Sauer, Skitter, Inc. managing director and senior fellow, and one of the inventors of PVBR. "In essence, Prioritized VBR gives operators the tools they need to manage quality of service on a stream-by-stream basis, and to continually monitor and adjust the bitrate to network conditions."
Skitter's PVBR adds rate shaping features to the Acclaim video encoder that allow the operator to choose the average bitrate of individual VBR streams and to cap the peak bit rate at a hard limit that will not exceed the capacity of ADSL network switches. PVBR also reduces buffering requirements.
For more:
- see this release
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