Jerky video and high prices associated with videophones will become a thing of the past, as Texas Instruments Inc. hopes to bring real-time, high-quality consumer videophones to the home.

The Dallas-based company has partnered with Wintech Digital Systems Technology Corp. to release the Videophone Development Platform (VDP), what the duo describes as a complete development platform for designing point-to-point IP-based videophone systems.

TI is banking on the breakdown of traditional barriers to adoption of videophones, such as choppy video quality and high unit cost. Those will be overcome, according to the company and its partner, with the recent introduction of new video codecs that require half the bandwidth for video transfers, the continuing penetration of IP broadband connectivity and the availability of single-chip encode and decode implementation.

Adding to the push are telecos looking for another revenue stream, says TI's Pradeep Bardia, business development manager for the company's video group.

"Teleco companies are finding that this is another medium for them to make money. It also plays to the triple play -- data, voice, video -- folks," he said, noting that ease of use is key to these companies. "If they can make it easy, with a triple play model and [reasonable] monthly fee ¡­ it will move from enterprise, to home office/small office, to consumer."

Several large carriers, such as Vonage and Verizon, have announced plans to roll out IP videophones and related services for small- to mid-sized businesses and individuals.  To that end, Wainhouse Research projects that overall the personal videoconferencing market will grow from about $21 million in 2003 to just south of $180 million in 2008, a compounded growth rate of about 53 percent.

But the variable here is broadband subscriber growth. While high-speed access has been more readily adopted in Europe and Asia -- the two areas Bardia claims have the highest respective proliferation so far -- subscriber rates are relatively low here in the United States.

"The faster broadband gets pervasive, the faster people will adopt video phones," he said.

TI is optimistic, but realistic. The company recognizes that videophones have been anticipated for nearly 40 years now and without help from the telcos and large-scale broadband adoption, even the clearest picture won't be enough to connect with consumers.

Still, Bardia feels the second half of 2004 and the high level of foot traffic video phones saw at January's Consumer Electronic Show prove consumer interest.

"In the last six months we've seen all these video applications grow quite a bit, and customers around the world are all over us asking for a processor that can support video, support voice and support data," he said.

Broken down, the VDP from TI and Wintech is an integrated hardware/software development platform. All application system software runs on TI's 600MHz DSP-based TMS320DM643 digital media processor, which allows OEMs to customize the entire design from codec to user interface and to create different product families and price lines based on the same platform. Likewise, the VDP uses complementary TI analog technology, including the TVP5150 video decoder and AIC23 audio codec.

From a hardware perspective, the modular VDP allows developers to connect the boards over a live network and/or the Internet to test under real-world operating conditions, TI said, adding that the platform is easily configured for different video telephony applications. The hardware platform includes external memory and a variety of peripherals and audio/video interfaces, network connectivity and communication interfaces.

The VDP includes all the software necessary to evaluate, design and test video telephony endpoints, including video and voice codecs, integrated reference frameworks, communications stack and network protocols.

Available now, the VDP includes two DM643 boards, two five-inch LCDs, two cameras, network switch/hub and complete ready-to-use application software, and is priced at $6,950.

By: DocMemory
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