As HD voice slowly arrives in the U.S. via mobile networks, jockeying is already taking place among software developers and OTT-based service providers to offer a full and complete audio experience for voice and video calling. Over the past week, I've received two pitches for "improved" OTT services with high-quality sound. Winners and losers in this battle are too early to call, but I'm willing to bet on established players that already have a significant advantage.
Young humans generally start off with an audio range from about 20 Hz to about 20 kHz. As we get older, the sad fact is our hearing at the higher ranges starts to decline. In comparison, a narrowband PSTN phone call is conducted in a range of 300 Hz to 3.4 Hz and an HD voice phone call using the G.722 or AMR-WB codec moves into the range of around 50 Hz to 7 kHz.
Needless to say, there's still a lot of room for improvement between an HD voice experience between 50 Hz to 7 kHz and a natural sound experience between 20 Hz to 20 kHz, with most of the improvements coming in on the higher end of what people can be reasonably expected to hear. Many high quality/full sound advocates draw comparisons of their offerings with CD or DVD digital audio delivery, where sound is sampled at up to 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz for processing.
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Spin, a mobile OTT video player launched this week by Net Power & Light (NPL), boasts of "ultrawideband" and 44 kHz voice sampling delivering "close to recording studio quality" as part of its packing, along with "close to the highest quality HDTV today." Another pitch I received via Twitter for VOVIE pointed me to an Indiegogo campaign page rattling off stats such as "Live Video Chats (to 1080 p), Stereo Voice Chats & Live Music Share (to 48 kHz, 16 bit Full Band Stereo, Blue Ray Quality)."
In both cases, the upstarts are aiming to out-Skype Skype with better sound and video quality along with other features. The SILK codec can sample audio at rates up to 24 kHz if the bandwidth and CPU resources area available, while Skype's uses H.264 to deliver 1080p video. Spin has a radically different user interface for video calling and drops a lot of "proprietary" and "patent" while VOVIE says it uses a "Never cracked" AES 512-bit key to ensure privacy.
But companies pushing closed solutions do so at their own peril. Established standards such as the AAC family of codecs for high-quality voice and WebRTC's use of Opus and VP8 make it easier for developers to add features and interoperate with other systems. The assumption everyone will download and use the latest-and-greatest gee-whiz app while displacing Skype and all the other established OTT apps floating out there is, shall we say, a high-risk business strategy.
I have no doubt a new OTT player with a different spin on things can leap into the market and build an island. But if the island can't get to the landmass of New Zealand in short order, it won't have long-term viability as a business.
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