Beyond The Cell -- Journalists' Video Phone

dimitri_k writes: "This article from poynter.org gives some information about the video phone that has become standard in reporting recently. It uses H.263 for compression, and a satellite phone to call into ISDN lines. Maybe people on Slashdot can brainstorm ways to increase the bandwidth of these things in the short term (i.e. cost-ineffective combination of lines) so that the cable news networks can turn the grainy, live, night-vision shots in Afghanistan clear." This setup looks a little chunky, but when you consider the capability to beam video information from anywhere in the world, it's very impressive.

Comments

Why real-time?

[MikeyNg]

It seems that alot of criticism is being directed at the choppy video feeds. There will always be a trade-off of quality and compression that is limited by bandwidth. I really don't see the bandwidth problem being solved in the near future. But, who says that these feeds really need to be in real-time? Yes, there are certain instances where having a real-time feed is useful, but it would also be good if they could capture some high quality feeds then "squirt" them to the receving stations. It wouldn't be instantaneous, but you could get a better quality feed.

One thought to improve bandwidth

[esvoboda]

This might be brute force, but how about add the capability to transfer data over two or more phone lines simultaneously, in parallel, if they exist at a location?

Re:NBC scales down image to clear it up.

[JabberWokky]

It might take 3 minutes to transmit 1 minute of footage this way.

First off, a 3 minute delay is still "live". So, you can live with that... you just can't interview the reported with the video synced. Second, if they do this with three systems, they get the video streaming. Third, if they are using three systems, then why not just link the streams? (interleave the frames, preferably, so if one drops, you just loose one out of every three frames). You then get near realtime (a chunk of a second lost in the bounce for an uncomfortable pause), and have a nice fallback.

Of course, if it were this easy, they would presumably be doing it. Or this may be very first gen, throw it together and hope it works style tech, and in six months we'll see all the good obvious ideas we post here are used as standards.

Or (donning my conspiracy hat), the obvious ideas are all held up by patents.

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Evan