Published:
12-Jun-07
China Telecom is to conduct field trails of the domestically-developed Audio Video coding Standard (AVS) for IPTV. The company has previously used MPEG-4 H.264 for all of its IPTV trials in China and also for its Shanghai service operated in partnership with Southern Media Group. This is the first indication that China Telecom is considering the local AVS standard. China Telecom has said that if trials prove successful they will consider dropping MPEG-4 altogether. Trials will start in Shanghai next month although the scale of the trials has not been revealed. China Telecom's IPTV service in Shanghai currently has 150,000 subscribers. Screen Digest forecasts that this number will rise to 190,000 by the end of 2007.
Our take...
AVS was selected by the Chinese government as the national compression standard for IPTV in late 2006 is claimed to provide an equivalent compression to MPEG-4. AVS is among a handful of domestically-developed standards that China is promoting in order to avoid royalties and licence fees. Trials of AVS have already been started by China Telecom's rival China Netcom in the north-eastern city of Dalian. China Netcom plans to develop AVS-based IPTV in 20 cities by the end of 2007. Screen Digest predicts that China will be the world's biggest IPTV market by 2010, with 6m subscribers. National adoption of AVS for IPTV would complete the 'set' for China. The country has already adopted locally developed standards for satellite, digital terrestrial television and mobile TV.
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