High Definition Television Over Internet Demonstration

ResearchChannel and Sony Electronics Inc. Reach Convergence Milestone in Success of High Definition Television Over Internet Demonstration

Seattle, Washington, October 11, 1999 - ResearchChannel, a consortium of leading research institutions creating greater access to research information, has teamed with Sony Electronics’ Broadcast and Professional Company to demonstrate the first ever streaming of high definition television (HDTV) over the Internet. On October 12, ResearchChannel and Sony present this successful experiment in a demonstration at the Internet2 Member Meeting at the University of Washington (UW). Internet2 members will have the opportunity to see streaming HDTV video as sent over the new high bandwidth Internet2 backbone from Stanford University in Palo Alto to the UW campus in Seattle.

“HDTV over the Internet brings us closer to a more perfect transfer of visual data,” said Amy Philipson, executive director of the ResearchChannel consortium. ³Particularly in the case of the accessing vivid images that are important to the progress of research activity. This is one of the highest speed applications ever run over the Internet.”

UW and Sony developers were extremely pleased as they viewed the success of their work that culminated in a 40 minute stream of HDTV video sent from Stanford over Internet2 to UW in an almost “dropless” 270 megabit connection. The demonstration used the highest quality industry standards with Sony HDCAM/HDVS ® equipment to capture, encode, and compress HDTV video. The success in the transfer of data is a result of original software code written by UW programmers that encapsulated the data into packets which were reliably transferred across Internet2 and reassembled as HDTV video in Seattle. This is a significant achievement as currently most television broadcasts on the Internet employ connections of 20 to 200 kilobits per second using short clips of video shown in small windows on PC screens.

“The challenge of these demonstrations is to be able to sustain a continuous stream of high definition video with perfect HD picture quality over Internet2,” said Michael Wellings, ResearchChannel chief engineer at the University of ashington. “The demanding data streams required by high definition video have significantly tested the performance characteristics of Internet2 and pushed the boundaries of HDTV video distribution over the Internet. With these tests we have seen the future and we know that with more work this quality can be something everyone will be able to enjoy.”

For more information:

Internet-HDTV Project
Technical Paper
Reference Guide
Schematic Diagrams (PDF) requires Acrobat Reader
Technology Press Preview of October 12 Demonstration
News stories from Seattle Times, Seattle P-I, and Wired News