What is Digital Convergence ?
Digital Convergence refers to the power of digital media to combine voice, video,
data, text, (and money) – all in new applications, devices and networks.
Digital Convergence, the digital takeover of communication and information, produces
a new kind of interchangeability and interconnectedness among different media forms.
The rise of digital media results in:
• the coming together, in a single application
or service, of information content from telephony, sound
broadcasting, television,
motion pictures, photography, printed text publishing, and
electronic money;
• a growing degree of overlap in
the functions that can be performed by different telecommunications
networks
• a growth in the interactivity and interoperability
and of different networks and information appliances in the
home and the office.
Example the
Elanza Web-Videophone™
The idea of digital convergence has been coming in and out of fashion for more than
two decades. Two of the prerequisites for digital convergence are :
1. A technological revolution in processing
power; and
2. A process of converging on common standards
Digital Convergence as analysed above is a combination of two factors: technological
improvements in processing power, and the adoption of common protocols and standards.
But raw technological power is only part of the digital convergence story. Often
overlooked is the fact that digital convergence also implies a process of settling
upon common protocols and technical standards for data interchanges. This is a predominantly
socioeconomic process, not a technical one, and involves the coordinated adoption
of compatible technology platforms by a critical mass of producers and consumers.
That process is affected by network externalities and product life-cycles. So, in
many ways, the progress of digital convergence is a story of the rise and fall of
specific standards that were designed to bring together various media forms. And
as economic theory on standardization has demonstrated, such processes are path-dependent,
and may be “tipped” into one of various possible equilibria by chance events.
Some of the standards and protocols developed by telecommunications companies to
incorporate digital convergence include – ISDN, Ethernet, TCP/IP, Frame Relays and
ATM (Asynchrouns Transfer Mode).
Digital Convergence in Everyday Life
A major reason why digital convergence is not simply a possibility for the future
but a certainty is the quality of digital materials. Think of the difference in
sound quality between an old LP recording and a music CD. The difference is that
the former is an analog medium, whereas the latter is digital, and digital materials
can be reproduced at any resolution, assuming that one has the storage space and
the bandwidth (bandwidth is simply the number of bits per second
that can be sent through a given medium, such as fiber optic cable or the air).
At some point, the level of resolution achieved by digitizing a signal, such as
a music track or a graphic image, becomes so good that it is indistinguishable,
given the limitations of our senses, from the real thing.
Another major reason why digital convergence will happen is that technology is rapidly
approaching the stage where high-bandwidth transmission of digital information between
any two places is possible. Telephone companies are replacing old copper twisted-pair
cables with new fiber-optic lines that transmit billions of bits per second at the
speed of light. In many areas of the United States, cable modem hookups to the Internet,
which provides up to 60 Mbps (that’s millions of bits per second) for downloads,
are now available. And, of course, governments around the globe are hard at work
updating their information infrastructures, including cables, routers, and switching
devices, to make high-bandwidth networking, on which economies of the future will
depend.
The Internet and Digital Converegnce
A convergent media market structure already exists in the Internet. Worldwide, the
Internet industry is beginning to experiment with a fully converged environment
in which television sets, telephones, and various digital devices and internet appliances
(such as the
Elanza Web-Videophone™
) besides PCs can be used to access, navigate,
communicate and transmit all forms of data – audio, video and text – through the
‘Net. This, of course, is what digital convergence is all about—and there is no
doubt that the meeting point for this change will be the Internet rather than traditional
cable TV or voice telephone systems. Thus, the Internet must be viewed as a bandwidth-constrained,
administratively immature version of the fully digital media of the future. It represents
the future of broadcasting and telecommunications as well as the future of networked
computing. As such, its economic features offer important insights into the market
structures and policy problems created by digital convergence.
Other technological
obstacles to digital convergence are being rapidly overcome. Storage prices have
dropped dramatically in the past decade. In the mid-1980s, a 20-megabyte hard drive
could cost as much as seven hundred dollars. Now, a 2-gigabyte hard drive can be
purchased for a fourth of that. It seems reasonable to expect that this exponential
drop in the cost of storage will continue. Recordable DVD-ROM and NAND FLASH are
but one of many emerging technologies that will give us all someplace to store those
massive audio and video files that come streaming over the global network onto our
home media centers and internet based appliances.
In the future, almost every device
will be a network device and will conform to digital convergence standards.
Digital Convergence with the Elanza Web-Videophone™
The Elanza Web-Videophone™ is a unique telephony based platform that incorporates
the power of digital media and digital convergence to combine voice, video and data
– all in one device. The device is an "open architecture" videophone that displays
full motion, quality video at 30 fps on a VGA resolution screen and uses standard
RFC SIP protocols thus avoiding proprietary VoIP server technologies.
The Elanza
Web-Videophone™ is an embedded product supporting unified communications , home
infotainment and digital convergence. The device functionalities include a regular
PSTN phone, a VOIP phone (supporting both SIP & H.323 protocols), a Video Mail Terminal,
a Video Communications and Conferencing solution, and an Internet Appliance terminal
ubiquitous to a regular telephone. The device uses Windows CE as an Operating System
and an 8.4 inch Super VGA TFT touch-screen providing better display of images and
video content at a higher resolution.
In addition to being a full featured POTS
and VOIP telephone, the device supports IE 6.0 based browsing capabilities and Email
standards. 3-way video conferencing is also supported on a CIF format at 25-30 FPS.
Click here for more information on the
Elanza Web-Videophone™