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Digital Fountain’s
ToughStream™ Engine Simplifies Integration of Forward Error
Correction (FEC) into IPTV and Internet TV Applications
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VOD Library Video on Demand
Digital Fountain, Inc.
June 5, 2006
Protects Streams from Impairments, enabling Perfect Quality
Fremont, CA -- Digital Fountain, Inc., the leading supplier of
advanced FEC (forward error correction) technology for reliable
communications, announced today the availability of the DF
ToughStream Engine for streaming applications including IPTV and
Internet TV. ToughStream provides application and equipment vendors
with the easiest way to incorporate FEC technology into streaming
applications. ToughStream “makes streams tough” protecting video and
audio streams from common impairments including packet loss, latency
and jitter and lost packets typical of IP networks, allowing
reliable and efficient delivery to the end-user without
interruptions.
Employing Digital Fountain’s patented DF Raptor™ FEC technology that
was standardized in 2005 by both 3GPP (the world’s largest cellular
standards organization) and DVB-H (the leading mobile broadcasting
standard), the ToughStream Engine minimizes bandwidth overhead and
all-but eliminates buffering delays by recovering lost packets
without requiring retransmission. Any packetized stream can be
protected, independent of the type of media encoding or compression,
data rate, or use of encryption. |
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“The secret is out and network architects are realizing that FEC
enables TV-grade delivery over IP while eliminating the requirement
to over-provision networks,” said Charlie Oppenheimer, CEO of
Digital Fountain. “The ToughStream Engine allows developers of IPTV
and Internet TV applications to quickly bring to market FEC-enabled
solutions that will deliver perfect quality streams while saving
money and bandwidth for operators and content providers.”
Alternative methods for ensuring stream quality are buffering data
ahead of time, which causes frustrating delays and limits the user’s
ability to sample numerous streams or “channel surf”, and Pro-MPEG
FEC. Pro-MPEG, sometimes used for IPTV solutions, wastes large
amounts of bandwidth and offers very limited protection of the
transported stream.
Prior to ToughStream, developers wishing to incorporate FEC had to
deeply understand how FEC works, create or adopt some suitable
protocol and then spend months tuning to achieve the desired
results. Often, such solutions were inflexible to the varying
demands of different networks.
With ToughStream, developers are presented with a simple and
familiar network socket architecture. ToughStream handles all of the
complexities of FEC processing and data transport automatically. The
sending application simply writes streaming packets to the socket
and the receiving application simply reads streaming packets from
the socket. Numerous parameters are run-time configurable, allowing
for simple tuning of the optimal mix of loss protection, bandwidth
usage, processing resources and quality.
The ToughStream Engine technology was designed to be simple for
licensees to quickly integrate into a streaming solution, allowing
developers to accelerate their time to market, reduce their
development costs, and reduce their project risk and complexity.
Because ToughStream incorporates DF Raptor, it offers the benefit of
the most efficient and effective FEC available. No other solution
can provide a similar combination of bandwidth efficiency and stream
quality.
Digital Fountain also announced the availability of the DF
ToughStream Evaluation Platform. Deployed as a hardware-based system
placed inline in production or laboratory networks, it allows
operators and equipment vendors to evaluate how a network will
perform with the ToughStream Engine without having to write a single
line of code. The system offers a simple web-based user interface
that allows the operator to vary ToughStream configuration
parameters and to measure resulting network and system performance.
Currently in broad commercial use for IPTV services offered in
Japan, the DF Raptor FEC technology is incorporated in Sumitomo
Electric Networks’ StreamCruiser IP set-top boxes – which are used
by subscribers of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corporation
Communications’ OCN Theater video-on-demand services and others.
About DF Raptor
Digital Fountain’s DF Raptor represents the culmination of years of
research by the company’s world-renowned scientists, Dr. Michael
Luby and Dr. Amin Shokrollahi. DF Raptor is an erasure correction
technology, capable of correcting “missing” or “lost” data. By
recovering lost data packets without requiring retransmission from
the sender, DF Raptor efficiently and effectively provides
reliability in data networks.
DF Raptor is able to generate a potentially limitless amount of
encoded data from any original set of source data, thereby
supporting extremes of low or high network loss as needed for a
particular application. Unlike conventional FEC codes where the
encoding and decoding calculations increase at an accelerating rate
as the size of the source data or amount of loss protection
increases, the processing requirements for DF Raptor increase only
linearly with the amount of source data, making it highly scalable.
As a result, DF Raptor can be implemented as lightweight
software-based solutions for a variety of multimedia streaming and
data transfer applications.
About Digital Fountain
Based in Fremont, California, Digital Fountain develops and licenses
advanced FEC (forward error correction) technology to enhance the
quality of communications over data networks. Digital Fountain’s
patented DF Raptor FEC technology improves multimedia streaming
quality, ensures timely delivery of data, and enables the creation
and development of new communications services. DF Raptor is used
today in a variety of enterprise, military, and consumer devices and
applications, supporting both wired and wireless telecommunications
networks. The company partners with some of the largest and most
sophisticated companies, including global defense company Northrop
Grumman (NYSE:NOC) and Sumitomo Electric Networks, to strategically
offer advanced communications to companies around the globe. For
more information, visit Digital Fountain’s Web site at
www.digitalfountain.com. |
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