Ittiam Unveils Next Generation VCS Room Conferencing with Audio Beam Forming and Seamless Call Continuity for an Unmatched Video Calling Experience in Living Rooms

BANGALORE, India, Jan. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Ittiam announces its next generation VCS^room bringing enterprise grade, over-the-top video conferencing to the living room, further enriched with call continuity and beam-forming for an enhanced consumer experience. New NPD In-Stat research forecasts that total users in the nascent living room video calling market will increase from 1.5 million in 2011 to 16.4 million in 2015.

The VCS^room is offered with a smartphone and tablet counterpart, VCS^mobile. Both are standard compliant, interoperable yet tightly-integrated solutions.  They allow users to enjoy seamless continuity in calls across smartphones or tablets and TV - as the user moves in and out of the living room. As an example, the user could place a call from the smartphone using VCS^mobile while sitting in her study and seamlessly switch the call to her TV with a simple swipe - as she enters the living room. As the user leaves the room, she could switch the call back to her smartphone with the same ease. Call continuity allows the user to experience the call on the device of her convenience but without a break.

Acoustics for a living room conferencing system is a unique challenge – given the noisy environment, seating layout and acoustic conditions of the room. Consequently, over the top living room conferencing systems typically suffer from poor audio quality when the person speaking is not close enough to the microphone.  VCS^room is equipped with advanced acoustic beam forming based on a microphone array that significantly improves the audio quality by reducing ambient noise and generating a single audio stream that is focused on the person speaking. The acoustic beam forming uses four microphones to single out the direction of active speaker and attenuate local audio reverberation to deliver high-quality audio experience even in a poor acoustic environment of a living room.

Salient features of VCS^room on the OMAP 5 platform include:

• Peer-to-peer video calling at 1080p
• Hands-free operation with high performance acoustics
• Beam Forming using microphone array
• Call continuity between mobile devices and the room conferencing system
• Intelligent, auto-adaptive bandwidth allocator that learns and adapts to the continuously changing network conditions
• Built-in Embedded Bridge delivers multi-party HD conferencing without external hardware or software or server assistance

"Our goal with the OMAP 5 processor has been to deliver an unmatched user experience," said Fred Cohen, director, OMAP ecosystem, TI. "We are excited to continue our collaboration with ecosystem partners such as Ittiam who make use of the defining features of this chipset, bringing out the best of the OMAP processor."

VCS^room on the OMAP 5 platform will be showcased at the TI Village in the North Hall (N115-N119) of the Las Vegas Convention Center at the Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas from 8^th  January  to 11th  January 2013.

VCS^room is available as an SDK with a reference application for Android™ and Linux™ that can be used to create standalone products or for enabling video calling in other products such as IP- STB's.

VCS^mobile is available as an SDK with a reference application for Android™ and iOS™ that can be customized or integrated into other applications.  VCS^mobile will initially be made available on iPad™ and popular Android tablets and then will be made available on other devices based on request.

For more information on technical details or to receive the demonstration package, visit the Ittiam website at www.ittiam.com or contact mkt@ittiam.com.

About the Texas Instruments Design Network

Ittiam Systems is a member of the TI Design Network, a premier group of independent, well-established companies that offer products and system-level design and manufacturing services complementing TI's semiconductors to a worldwide customer base to accelerate product innovation and time-to-market. Network members provide product design, hardware and software system integration, turnkey product design, RF and processor system modules, reference platforms, software development, proof-of-concept design, feasibility studies, research, certification compliance, prototyping, manufacturing, and product life cycle management. For more information about the TI Design Network, please visit http://www.ti.com/designnetwork .

About Ittiam Systems Private Limited

Ittiam Systems Private Limited, headquartered in Bangalore, India, is a technology company singularly focused on embedded media centric systems. It operates through its network of offices and representatives around the world. Ittiam's customers include Fortune 100 companies and are distributed across U.S., Europe, Japan and Asia. Since 2004 the company has been consistently rated as the "World's Most Preferred DSP IP Supplier" in the annual surveys conducted by Forward Concepts Incorporated. In 2005 Ittiam had been selected by Red Herring into the top 100 private companies in Asia. In February 2007, Ittiam received the NASSCOM India IT Innovation Award, a prestigious recognition. In July 2011 Ittiam's VC won the Product of the Year 2010 from Communications Solutions. In January 2012 Ittiam won two Product of the Year 2011 awards from Internet Telephony. Embedding Ittiam IP inside, annual volume of customers' products shipped such as Smartphones, Tablets, Broadcast, Video Communication and Wi-Fi Devices is in several tens of millions units

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SOURCE Ittiam