14 DAY TRIAL // It turns out that Intel is not the only company with grand designs for the Internet TV industry. NVIDIA means to launch an IPTV service of its own, so it has partnered with Elemental.
Elemental is a supplier of video solutions for multi-screen content delivery, hence NVIDIA's decision to call upon its assistance.
Its platform is used by many major brands, like HBO and Comcast, to deliver multi-screen video content to subscribers.
It even “pioneered the use of GPUs for high-quality video transcoding” according to Greg Estes, NVIDIA’s general manager of media and entertainment.
The key to successful multi-screen content deployment is described as the application of flexible software on powerful hardware.
On that note, the Elemental Server and Elemental Live solutions have been refashioned specifically for NVIDIA's Tesla GPU products.
And by Tesla, we do indeed mean the mighty GPU compute accelerators, including the one used in the world's strongest supercomputer (Titan).
“The migration path Elemental offers has allowed us to significantly increase our video transport quality and efficiency as the market demand for multiscreen video continues to grow,” said Comcast Cable Video Quality and Reliability VP Dave Higgins.
The NVIDIA-powered Elemental products will have higher density and throughput thanks to parallel processing.
With IPTV subscriptions expected to double by 2016, NVIDIA and its partner have a chance to secure many customers. In fact, since 65% of all US households will watch 58 billion hours of video and TV shows on tablets by 2017, there is definitely a market to be exploited here.
According to NVIDIA, “dozens of brands” already have the new platform “deployed in production environments.”
Not too many years from now, it might be common to have a single set-top box in the house from which dwellers can view different channels on their PCs, TVs, tablets and phones at the same time.