News & Analysis
After design loss in Sony TV, what's next for Amimon?
Junko Yoshida
11/17/2009 2:22 PM EST
 |
| Amimon's WHDI module in Mini-PCI format factor -- available now -- for PCs |
NEW YORK — You are a struggling wireless video startup, five years in. Your biggest brand-name customer, a Japanese TV maker, just designed you out of their latest model. The market still doesn't fully appreciate the fundamental strength of your technology: the ability to wirelessly deliver "uncompressed" HDTV signals through walls into multiple rooms at home.
What next?
The answer for Amimon, a developer of Wireless High-definition Interface (WHDI) technology running at 5-GHz frequency, is a strategic change in product focus (from living-room TV to PCs) and in its business model (licensing out its crown jewel video-modem technology as IP to a leading WiFi chip company). The company will continue to pursue its multiple-room wireless high-definition home-networking scheme.
Just to be clear, Amimon hasn't signed up any WiFi chip vendor for IP licensing -- just yet. But EE Times has learned that discussions are in progress. Amimon's idea is to pave the road for a day when WHDI comes free to OEMs when they buy WiFi chips. Amimon can only pull this off by soliciting the help of WiFi chip companies who already know how to reduce the cost of 5GHz wireless communication chips.
Noam Geri, Amimon's co-founder, vice president of marketing and business development, made it clear: "We are not turning ourselves into an IP company." But he quickly added, "We are, however, willing to give up certain markets to make this happen."
Promoting WHDI in the home market has been an uphill battle for Amimon — and anyone who supports WHDI — because hardly any TVs or PCs today come equipped with WHDI transmitters or receivers.
Thus, the marriage of WiFi and WHDI holds promise for solutions to this classic chicken-and-egg problem. Amimon's Geri pointed out: "100 million PCs today have WiFi " in all of them." Both WiFi and WHDI run on a 5GHz frequency, using OFDM and MIMO. "80 percent of our wireless solutions share common building blocks," said Geri.
Radio-independent
Industry analysts also think Amimon's new strategy makes sense.
Craig Mathias, principal of Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.) said, "I've always thought of Amimon as a video technology company that just happened to build one possible implementation of their technology. The concept really is radio- (and, in fact, channel-) independent." Mathias added, "It's an amazing bandwidth-reduction approach that yields truly fabulous results."
Comments
jyoshida
11/17/2009 6:43 PM EST
It does make sense for combining WHDI with WiFi -- definitely for Amimon, and perhaps for some service operators who want to offer multi-room wireless HD home networking solutions. A bigger question, however, is: Have you ever heard anyone asking for it?
Sign in to Reply
Lynne_AL
11/18/2009 5:01 PM EST
This seems problematic to me; the JSSC approach fundamentally breaks the partitioning of a Wi-Fi solution, which has a separate channel coder (in the PHY) and source coder (above the MAC). You can't just mix and match these pieces that easily. In addition, the JSSC in inherently lossy because it knows some bits carry more information than others; you'd have to put in a special "lossless" mode with equal error protection to carry traditional IP data, which basically puts you back to a standard Wi-Fi radio. Hence, an Amimon licensee would have to have a much more complex piece of silicon that combines a traditional Wi-Fi stack with a JSSC system that bypasses a codec, MAC, and parts of the PHY. I think the Wi-Fi guys will simply tack an H.264 codec on top of the MAC and ship it - why would they do anything else?
Sign in to Reply
NoamG
11/19/2009 12:55 AM EST
WHDI's JSCC Video-Modem approach has been proven in the market to provide the highest quality and robust wireless HD solution with practically no latency. An integrated WHDI and Wi-Fi solution will actually be simpler and much less complex than an integrated Wi-Fi+H.264 encoder solution since WHDI and Wi-Fi have many common building blocks (OFDM, MIMO etc.). Moreover, real-time compression with H.264 degrades quality and adds latency (which is a problem in gaming)
Sign in to Reply
jyoshida
11/19/2009 6:31 AM EST
To Lynn_AL: Actually, I used to think WiFi + H.264 is "the" solution for video networking at home. But no more. The proliferation of so many incompatible codecs used on various Web sites makes it very tough to settle on one codec -- for home networking. What do you think?
Sign in to Reply
RB54
12/16/2009 11:53 PM EST
To JYoshida in response to Lyn_AL:
Thanks for the article, it was very informative. Two questions:
-Why do you think Amimon's solution will not have compatibility issue. I am thinking it will add to the crowd of codecs (essentially this is a compression scheme).
-Any thought that WiFi LAN proliferation will crowd the WiFi band and interferes with a video solution (in any form) operating in WiFi band?
Sign in to Reply
ShayF
12/27/2009 2:57 AM EST
WHDI is different from a combination of a codec and WiFi. For starters, WHDI is a CE standard which deals not only with the low levels of communication and video delivery but also with higher layers of CE control, A/V protocols, interoperability of devices, content protection and more. In addition, WHDI's "codec" takes into account the fact that the information is wirelessly transmitted and implements efficient error concealment methods. It also adapts better to the varying channel condition. So, you may think of it as a coder that was designed for wireless delivery. The wireless delivery itself is also different from WiFi both in the PHY level where tools that cannot be used for data are exploited for the video, and in the MAC level, which ensures a low latency and robust delivery while taking care of interference.
So, using a combination of a coder and WiFi is still far from being a solution since it does not ensure interoperability (even if the same coder is used on both sides) and it does not deliver the video robustly and in good quality while maintaining low latency. On the other hand, since most of the underlying tools are similar (OFDM, MIMO, 5GHz, compression toolsets) a combined solution with lower cost and higher functionality can be designed.
Sign in to Reply