Month: August 2004

A major Japanese satellite broadcaster may adopt Apple’s QuickTime for supporting the new H.264 format when it launches commercial broadcasts in mid-October.

Mobile Broadcasting said it is “considering changing the video codec for its digital satellite broadcasting service for mobile devices from MPEG-4 to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC,” according to Asia Online. The company said it began looking into such a shift six months ago, “because H.264 has higher coding efficiency and can produce more benefits.

H.264 may enable an increase of the number of video channels as well as improved image quality,” says the report, even though no final choice has been made yet.

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Adam Build at MediaPost has put together a number of up-to-date numbers regarding the internet, television and radio:

•Traditional institutions – like offline media, for a not-so-random example – are under intense pressure. Almost everything they do is filtered though a consumer prism of frustration, skepticism and suspicion.

•Network television viewing continues to tumble. Radio listenership is down as much as 20 percent. Newspapers are only read by the soon-to-be-embalmed parents of baby boomers. Magazine circulation is off nearly as much as its ad pages.

MediaPost reports that video and rich media were run last year by two-thirds of advertising companies. While the impact has not yet occurred the problems are identified as platform and content. The known misconception is that an audience for video is too small. Also acknowledged is that many want to run streaming video in proprietary formats, which is the biggest cause for concern. Instead of adopting the MPEG-4 video standard companies are locking their work into several locked down formats that do not play well on the internet’s vast stage.

At the Jupiter Advertising Forum today JupiterResearch has also suggested that most agencies have no idea what to do with on-line video, and that off-line agencies will have to spearhead the process for advertisers.

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