Imagination introduces world's highest quality WebRTC media engine

Enhanced voice/video conferencing for mobile and tablet OEMs, social networking providers and telcos

London UK, 17^th April, 2014 – Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) introduces an innovative WebRTC media engine that promises to deliver a new level of quality to companies building native or browser-based voice and video conferencing services based on WebRTC. Imagination’s HelloSoft WebRTC engine with its unique, proven algorithms provides enhanced voice and video quality for a superior user experience across mobile and tablet platforms.

The open WebRTC initiative, supported by Google, Mozilla, Opera and others, enables development of rich, web-based Real-Time Communications (RTC) multimedia applications such as video chat, file/screen-sharing and other two-way communications.

Companies bringing WebRTC applications to mobile devices must consider challenges such as power consumption, packet losses in wireless environments, bandwidth availability, echo cancellation and resource/memory availability, among others.

Krishna Yarlagadda, president, Imagination Inc., says: “Imagination has deep expertise in developing media engines and related technologies, and our HelloSoft V.VoIP and VoLTE clients have already shipped in millions of devices worldwide. With this experience and leadership in building a wide range of leading IP for mobile platforms and other resource constrained devices, we understand the issues faced by our customers in bringing WebRTC to mobile. With our advanced algorithms encapsulated in an off-the-shelf product, we are enabling our customers to dramatically improve the WebRTC user experience.”

Research firm Disruptive Analysis predicts that by the end of 2014, 1.6 billion devices will support WebRTC, growing to 4.7 billion by the end of 2017.

Dean Bubley, director of Disruptive Analysis, says: “We’re seeing adoption of WebRTC particularly growing in mobile devices, where cloud-enabled apps, WebRTC platform providers and iOS/Android support are driving new use cases and spurring developer interest. Audio/video quality is an important element which will help drive widespread consumer adoption, but it has many angles. Often overlooked are issues such as acoustic echo cancellation and media performance, in a wide range of physical operating conditions for devices. It’s good to see innovation and focus in that domain.”

Imagination’s HelloSoft WebRTC media engine incorporates a number of features for better performance, functionality and overall user experience:

• Improved voice quality for speaker phone functionality across platforms with pre-processing modules for acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), noise cancellation (NC) and more
• Superior quality voice and video under lossy wireless environments through Imagination’s DVQM (Dynamic Video Quality Management) and EVQM (Enhanced Voice Quality Management) algorithms that mitigate up to 30% of packet losses
• Optimized for major processor architectures including the MIPS CPU architecture, with support for Android, iOS, Windows and Linux-based operating systems
• Support for a comprehensive list of voice codecs including OPUS, G.722, G.722.1, AMR-WB, AMR-NB, G.729ab, G.723.1, G.711, Speex, EVRC, iLBC; plus video codecs including VP8 and H.264
• Leverage of the hardware video accelerators available on a device, such as PowerVR video codecs found in millions of devices

Imagination’s WebRTC media engine is also available as a complete turn-key client in combination with call management software and SIP stack.

About HelloSoft V.VoIP and WebRTC

Imagination’s HelloSoft range of licensable IP includes comprehensive software SDKs delivering everything needed to implement high-quality, power-efficient enhanced WebRTC, Voice over IP and LTE (VoIP, VoLTE), Voice plus Video over IP (V.VoIP) and Rich Communications Suite (RCS 5.0) for multi-mode wireless and wireline devices. HelloSoft IP products and technologies are ‘carrier-grade’ cross-platform solutions, already deployed in millions of devices. Built on years of engineering experience to ensure that they are ready for the most extensive 3G, 4G and enterprise network deployments, all SDKs and platforms are available for Android, iPhone, Windows and Linux environments.

HelloSoft technology is also used in Imagination’s innovative FlowTalk V.VoIP application, part of Imagination’s FlowCloud platform.

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination is a global technology leader whose products touch the lives of billions of people throughout the world. The company’s broad range of silicon IP (intellectual property) includes the key multimedia, communications and general purpose processors needed to create the SoCs (Systems on Chips) that power all mobile, consumer, automotive, enterprise, infrastructure, IoT and embedded electronics. These are complemented by its unique software and cloud IP and system solution focus, enabling its licensees and partners get to market quickly by creating and leveraging highly differentiated SoC platforms. Imagination’s licensees include many of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, network operators and OEMs/ODMs who are creating some of the world’s most iconic and disruptive products. See: www.imgtec.com.