IMS a foundation for mobile video

Mobile video calling and sharing, and mobile TV distribution are the kinds of multimedia services and applications which IMS networks should enable and enhance because of their access agnostic nature and capacity to blend services.

While mobile TV is yet to be integrated into IMS, says Asher Shiratzky, CTO of RADVISION Technology Business Unit, IMS-enabled video services are now in the testing phase and showing great promise.

"The good news about IMS is it is access agnostic, you can access through ADSL, from 3G cellular, and in the future from cable," argues Shiratzky, whose company in January released its first IMS-ready solution, the V2 release of its Scopia Interactive Video Platform.

"It [Scopia] can interoperate into the IMS network: in the IP and IMS world it needs to have specific interfaces to interoperate with the IMS application server," explains Shiratzky.

RADVISION's pedigree is in video conferencing and enabling circuit switched 3G video conferencing. With the advent of IMS the company has positioned itself to enable packetised IMS-based video telephony and to provide gateways to interoperate IMS video with 3G and other video streams.

"Not all video capacity is on IMS, some is on other SIP networks, some on circuit switched networks, so we offer a gateway to the market for interworking," says Shiratzky.

As well as basic communications, video telephony between two people and video conferencing between multiple parties, RADVISION enables video blogging from the cellphone onto the web and video portals incorporating content from various suppliers.

"The operator can build a portal for customers and users can navigate content using the keypad of the phone-type 1 for CNN, 2 for sport streamed from TV stations-or access clips from different places, or surveillance cameras," suggests Shiratzky.

In Austria the company has supplied an application to Hutchison Austria that allows skiers to view video from cameras on the mountainside.

But it is in blended services where IMS comes into its own says Shiratzky, services such as video sharing.

"It is a service where your voice is going through a standard circuit switch like GSM and the video is going through IMS. For example, if I am talking with you while on the beach and see something I want to show you I can open the camera and there is an IMS call for video placed so you can see what I can see."

RADVISION is also enabling video sharing conferences so that one person can show their video capture to many recipients. "If you are a journalist with a cameraphone you can report to multiple contacts," offers Shiratzky as an example.

Indeed, in the age of citizen journalism and user-generated content, IMS network operators might consider exploring how to push video content back from mobile devices into the network and then onto other IMS-linked devices like televisions and computers.

"Rather than trying to squeeze television onto a mobile phone, the industry should arguably be focusing instead on reversing the flow of data," suggests a recent report by consultants Deloitte and Touche, which notes that as handset camera quality increases the volume of user-generated content will multiply.

Putting that content into an IMS architecture could enable smooth delivery back to TVs and computers enabling mobile operators to make a business out of transmitting images to larger screens instead of smaller ones. 

Shiratzky notes that, at the moment, "mobile TV is not fully integrated into IMS standards, the protocols of MediaFLo and DVB-H and so on.." He says that there is a push by TISPAN to integrate TV services in the next specification of TISPAN IMS.

RADVISION's preference is for IP-based standards like DVB-H, "because they are more convenient to integrate into IMS as IMS is a service architecture on top of IP," he explains.

Looking to the future, he sees new initiatives in 3GPP to integrate MBMS technology for broadcast and multicast television and video, possibly into IMS standards. "When we talk about the future ability to do streaming this MBMS will be the technology," argues Shiratzky. 

Most of RADVISION's services are in beta testing acknowledges Shiratzky although some (unannounced) commercial services are in operation. There remain key challenges ahead for IMS, he believes, namely vendor interoperability and the availability of IMS handsets.  

Handsets are in the pipeline, however. "This year we will see more and more vendors announcing and starting to develop and sell IMS handsets. In the last month some of the big guns have announced IMS terminals, mainly LG and Samsung, and going forward in the near future all others will announce IMS phones as well."

He should know. Radvision is not only an infrastructure provider but also a protocol provider and Shiratzky says the company is working with some of the big five handset vendors to integrate IMS protocols into their products.