Envivio has China's AVS Encode

Envivio of South San Francisco California has announced that its IPTV encoders now support China's AVS encoding standard. The company will demonstrate its AVS encoder at CCBN in Beijing at the end of March.

All of the intellectual property for AVS is owned by China. The intellectual property behind the MPEG-4 AVC video encoding standard is owned by western companies. Using AVS eliminates the requirement to make payments to companies outside of China to use MPEG-4 AVC. The AVS standard is broader in that it includes contains video, audio and digital rights management AVS became the national standard in China in April 2005.

Information about AVS may be found at:

http://www.avs.org.cn/en/

It is clear how having a separate standard helps China from a licensing point of view. China is working to own its own intellectual property and to keep a much higher portion of systems revenue in China. There seems to be no strong technical or performance reason for a separate standard.