Website: Rapid TV News


Just a few days ahead of the giant Barcelona 3G World Congress comes news that this year will see more than 2 billion MPEG-based chipsets shipped globally, helped by the growing importance of portable media.

Research analysts at InStat say as consumers access digital video on more devices, applications for MPEG digital video compression technology are expanding, particularly in portable devices. As a result, shipments of MPEG ICs, which support compression and decompression of digital video, will reach 2 billion units by 2013.

“Compression technology continues to improve, offering lower bit rates and higher quality, as well as lower cost and power,” says Michelle Abraham, In-Stat analyst. “H.264 compression is finding a home in most new MPEG ICs targeting both line-powered and mobile devices.”

InStat’s research, Worldwide MPEG IC market, covers the worldwide market for MPEG integrated circuits. Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

- Qualcomm was the leader in the mobile MPEG codec IC market for mobile handsets, while Zoran leads among “Other Mobile Applications”, followed closely by Samsung.

- MPEG IC market share differs among the various types of line-powered consumer electronics, such as set top boxes, TVs, and DVD equipment. The leaders include Broadcom, MediaTek, NXP, Sigma Designs and STMicroelectronics.

- Among the key technology trends include:

i) H.264 compression has superseded MPEG-2 in many line-powered applications;
ii) The Scalable Video Codec (SVC) extension to the H.264 is a major enhancement coming to the MPEG digital video system.
iii) With the standardization of 3D Blu-ray, multiview video coding (MVC), another extension of H.264, gains in importance.