New video codec to ease pressure on global networks A new video coding standard building on the PrimeTime Emmy award winning ITU-T H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC was agreed by ITU members in January 2013.
The new codec will considerably ease the burden on global networks where, by some estimates, video accounts for more than half of bandwidth use. The new standard, known informally as ‘High Efficiency Video Coding’ (HEVC) will need only half the bit rate of its predecessor, ITU-T H.264 / MPEG-4 Part 10 ‘Advanced Video Coding’ (AVC), which currently accounts for over 80 per cent of all web video. HEVC will unleash a new phase of innovation in video production spanning the whole ICT spectrum, from mobile devices through to Ultra-High Definition TV.
ITU-T’s Study Group 16 has agreed first-stage approval (consent) of the much-anticipated standard known formally as Recommendation ITU-T H.265 or ISO/IEC 23008-2. It is the product of collaboration between the ITU Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
3rd Green ICT Application Challenge: Deadline extended
Organized by ITU in partnership with Telefónica, the Challenge will award a prize of 5,000 USD to the creator of the app that best promotes Smart Sustainable Cities and environmental sustainability in urban areas.
Developers can submit concepts individually or as part of a team. Submissions must be original and should deal with one of the following subjects: transport and mobility; management of energy, water, health services or waste; adaptation to climate change; town planning, including smart buildings; and smart sustainable societies, community participation and environmental education.
The winner will be selected according to criteria including impact, scalability, the degree of innovation, feasibility, the quality of the implementation plan and the business model. In addition, priority will be given to applications that can help developing countries to solve environmental problems in an urban context.
The Challenge launched 20 December 2012.
ITU establishes Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities
ITU-T has established a new Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities to assess the standardization requirements of cities aiming to boost their social, economic and environmental sustainability through the integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their infrastructures and operations.
ITU-T Study Group 5 – Environment and climate change – agreed the formation of the new Focus Group at its meeting in Geneva, 29 January to 7 February 2013.
The creation of the Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities answers a Call to Action on “Smart Sustainable Cities” proposed in September 2012 at ITU’s 2nd Green Standards Week in Paris. “Smart Sustainable Cities’’ is also the theme of ITU’s 3rd Green ICT Application Challenge.
Cities are powerful engines of economic growth, fuelled by intensive interpersonal communication and high concentrations of specialized skills. Urbanization’s advantages are however mirrored by significant sustainability challenges, with cities today accounting for over 70 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 60-80 per cent of global energy consumption.
Given that an estimated 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, sustainable urbanization has become a key policy point to administrations across the world. Here ICTs have a crucial role to play by increasing environmental efficiency across industry sectors and enabling such innovations as intelligent transport systems (ITS) and "smart" water, energy and waste management.
The Focus Group will act as an open platform for smart-city stakeholders – such as municipalities; academic and research institutes; non-governmental organizations (NGOs); and ICT organizations, industry forums and consortia – to exchange knowledge in the interests of identifying the standardized frameworks needed to support the integration of ICT services in smart cities.
Focus Group leadership team:
Chairman
· Silvia Guzman, Telefónica
Vice-Chairmen
· Pablo Bilbao, Federation Argentina de Municipios
· Flavio Cucchietti, Telecom Italia
· Sekhar Kondepudi, National University of Singapore
· Nasser Saleh Al Marzouqi, UAE
· Franz Zichy, USA
· Ziqin Sang, Fiberhome Technologies Group
Specific tasks and deliverables of the Focus Group include:
· Defining the role of ICTs in environmentally sustainable smart cities, and identifying the ICT systems necessary to the development of a Smart Sustainable City.
· Collecting and documenting information on existing smart city initiatives and technical specifications, focusing in particular on the identification of standardization gaps.
· Identifying or developing a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to gauge the success of smart-city ICT deployments.
· Establishing relationships and liaison mechanisms with other bodies engaged in smart-city studies and development.
· Identifying future smart-city standardization projects to be undertaken by its parent group, ITU-T Study Group 5.Developing a roadmap for the ICT sector’s contribution to Smart Sustainable Cities, providing cohesion to the development and application of technologies and standards.
The meeting also agreed first-stage approval (consent) of the latest addition to ITU-T’s L.1400 series of standardized methodologies to assess the environmental impact of ICTs. The consent adds “ICT projects” to the list of ICT deployment scenarios covered by ITU-T’s environmental impact assessment methodologies. The new methodology (ITU-T L.1430) provides a framework to measure reductions in GHG emissions and energy consumption resulting from implementations of ICT projects including smart buildings, smart transport, and telepresence or videoconferencing services.
More information on ITU-T, Environment and Climate Change here
ITU standards underpin transcontinental IPTV experiment
For the second year running, ITU-standardized IPTV technologies have been deployed in an international IPTV experiment held in conjunction with the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan, 5-11 February 2013. The experiment ran over ITU’s IPTV IPv6 Global Testbed and was successful in its ambitious attempt to employ ten software-defined networks (SDNs) simultaneously.
ITU headquarters in Geneva received high-definition IPTV content from the head-end server in Japan via a native end-to-end IPv6 connection, participating alongside broadcasters, government agencies, network operators, manufacturers and research institutes from Japan, Singapore and the Philippines.
IPTV services were used to live-stream scenes from Sapporo and to provide supporting Video on Demand (VoD) segments, accompanied by integrated social media tools and a remotely-provided captioning service. A particular achievement was the use of RISE, a next-generation Internet based on OpenFlow, to deliver IPTV content to Singapore where IPv4 and IPv6 were combined virtually (more on ITU and IPv6 here).
Core ITU standards underpinning the experiment included Recommendation ITU-T H.721’s IPTV terminal for Video on Demand (VoD) and Linear TV, and ITU-T H.762’s Lightweight Interactive Multimedia Environment (LIME) for interactive IPTV services.
Such experiments – together with ITU IPTV Interoperability events – are important steps towards broadening the IPTV market through globally-interoperable services. Standardized IPTV will lead to a whole new market for innovation, and ITU standards will ensure this market remains open, competitive and accessible to all.
ITU-T Study Group 16 is producing the standards required to drive widespread adoption of IPTV. Global standards will lower the costs of these services for vendors and consumers, avoiding costly ‘format wars’ and enabling rollouts of the technology to a scale not achievable with proprietary solutions.
Fully Networked Car 2013: The Future of Vehicles
An upcoming workshop on the Fully Networked Car, the eighth event in the series, will host an international selection of experts to discuss the latest developments in the intelligent transport space with a view to building consensus on the best path towards global standards for a safer, cleaner and far more connected driving experience. Responding to rapid progression in the sophistication of intelligent transport systems (ITS), the workshop’s discussions will conclude by setting the standardization agenda and industry priorities for the coming year.
Organized by IEC, ISO and ITU under the banner of the World Standards Cooperation, the “Fully Networked Car 2013 – The Future of Vehicles” is being held 6-7 March 2013 at Palexpo in Geneva. It will take place within the Geneva International Motor Show. With 6 March being the final press day of the Motor Show and the 7th the official opening, workshop participants will gain exclusive insight into car manufacturers’ latest products as well as their visions of what consumers can expect in the future.
Fully Networked Car 2013 will be moderated for the second consecutive year by Richard Parry-Jones, a former executive at Ford Motor Company, and it will analyze developments in the automotive sphere with a particular focus on the ICT standardization needed to support recent advances in automotive ICTs. The workshop will assemble industry-leading minds from both the automotive and ICT communities; moving towards better collaboration by these industry sectors and thus more efficient development and adoption of the global standards needed to drive large-scale rollouts of ITS.
So-called “cooperative ITS” – in which vehicles communicate with each other and with the infrastructure around them – has the potential to enable more efficient traffic management, less congestion, fewer accidents and lower volumes of greenhouse gas emissions. Standards for cooperative ITS will thus be a central topic at March’s workshop, as will energy efficiency and standardization work concerning electric vehicles and smart grids.
Other key topics will be standardization to minimize driver distraction and enhance vehicle safety as the use and inclusion of ICTs in automobiles increases, as will comparisons of the tremendously different ITS challenges and opportunities encountered by developing and developed countries.
Registration to attend the event closes 22 February 2013.
More information is available here…
To drive the creation of an internationally accepted, globally harmonized set of ITS communication standards, ITU and other organizations with ITS activities have established an open collaboration group that next meets 21-22 March 2013 in Beijing, China. 