Saturday, October 13, 2007

AVS Creating Lockout in China

Products from UTStarcom, ZTE, Huawei and Alcatel Shanghai Bell have been checked and accepted following tests carried out in Dalian in October 2007. The tests are targeting the application of products using home-developed AVS video compression technology on China Netcom's pilot AVS-IPTV system, which has operated steadily for more than six months.
Overseas equipment providers did not join in the tests, because they mainly support foreign standards, such as MEPG4 and H.264.

Apparently China Netcom will only adopt the AVS video compression standard in its IPTV deployment if the tests in Dalian are successful, aimed at avoiding high patent fees from using foreign standards. If equipment providers do not adopt AVS, they will lose the opportunity in China's market.

Currently China Telecom has not standardized on AVS and is using MPEG-4. Using AVS will be a requirement for the headends, the set-top boxes, and the video on demand systems in particular. If AVS takes hold in China, other companies will adopt it in order to gain access to this very large IPTV market.

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