Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Industrial alliance on AVS on the way

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Industrial alliance on AVS on the way

    By Liu Baijia (China Daily)
    Updated: 2005-04-18 08:42

    An industrial alliance will be formed as late as May to promote the home-grown audio video coding standard (AVS), which competes with the international MPEG4 (Moving Picture Experts Group) standard, but is more likely to co-operate in devising a global standard.

    Huang Tiejun, secretary-general of the AVS working group, said last week that the alliance will be composed of 14 leading Chinese electronics manufacturers, content providers and developers.

    "Our working group is responsible for drafting the standard and the industrialization work should be done by the industry itself," said Huang.

    The AVS working group also unveiled the first decoding chip AVS 101 on March 2 and Chinese electronics firms Langchao and SVA also demonstrated set-top boxes with the chip.

    Other Chinese firms including computer giant Lenovo, electronics giant Haier, TV maker TCL and Skyworth all expressed strong interests in the standard.

    Huang said his group will increase efforts to lobby the Chinese Government to encourage companies to adopt the standard in their products.

    He hoped the government can provide some financial incentives including research and development funds and help them popularize products based on the standard.

    But another equally important way is to speed up the standardization process.

    Huang said the video standard part, the most difficult and important section of the AVS, was publicized by the Ministry of Information Industry as a candidate for the national standard.

    If there is no objection in one month, it will be submitted to the Standardization Administration of China for approval and then become the national standard.

    Audio and video standards define specifications of coding, decoding and processing of audio and visual content on electronic devices such as TV sets, DVD players and recorders, laser disks, video cameras, computers and mobile phones. Its impacts on the whole electronic industry is believed to be huge.

    Both AVS and MPEG4 aim to provide industrially unified standards, but the licensing regime of MPEG4, which usually charges manufacturers millions of dollars a year, has prompted the birth of AVS, an open and economically affordable standard.

    Gao Wen, head of the AVS working group, estimated that China needs 40 million coding and decoding chips a year and the use of AVS will save the country at least US$1 billion royalties in 10 years.

    The effects on electronics terminals will be more significant, as China has over 400 million TV sets, as well as 300 million mobile phones and 300 million fixed-line phones.

    The working group has finished or almost finished drafting all four parts of AVS: system, video, audio and digital copyright management and the video part was the first submitted for approval.

    Huang expects the whole standard to win approval from the Chinese Government.

    Although AVS is mainly an initiative of many Chinese organizations, Gao said openness is a key principle of his group and anyone willing to share its achievement can join the group.

    He added that although AVS, like many other Chinese standardization efforts, resulted from the dissatisfaction of Chinese industries with the old expensive licensing regimes, it will not seek to exclude international members and will participate in international standardization efforts.

    The organization already has over 130 members and some foreign companies like US semiconductor company LSI Logic, Intel China, LG China, Dolby Laboratories Beijing office and Nokia China, all participated in some activities of the organization.

    He said AVS is also likely to co-operate with MPEG4 and has been talking with the latter about co-operation, because China is such a huge market and perhaps has the strongest electronics manufacturing capability in the world and should have a voice in the international standardization effort.

    "The opportunities for us to step on the international standardization platform are already mature," said Gao.
Working...
X