Broadband applications available today have only begun to demand the bandwidth that will be required in a few years time and as the popularity of high-definition television (HDTV) grows, high-definition steams will multiply from one to two, three and more per household.

There already is considerable demand for high-speed connectivity around the home and on the go – whether it be on a notebook PC, an in-car display, video-enabled mobile phones such as the Motorola MOTO M10, handheld mobile TV sets such as the Motorola Mobile TV DH01

Motorola believes this media mobility architecture will include broadband everywhere over wired, mobile or a combination of both network types optimised for delivery of the different types of content ranging from small video clips such as those of on You Tube all the way up to HDTV.

Juniper Research estimates there will be a billion mobile broadband users by 2011 and WiMAX will be an important factor in this growth.

Video consumption is also exploding, with 100 million video clips on You Tube watched each day and it’s not just standard-quality content which is watched on PCs or over mobile networks which is generating interest but high-definition images are becoming more popular too.

IMS Research forecasts that there will be 148 million households worldwide receiving HDTV by 2011 compared to 35 million today and to organise the viewing experience and easily build content libraries, set-top boxes and digital video recorders (DVRs) are becoming increasingly popular and the number of households with DVRs is expected to jump from 14 million in 2005 to 65 million in 2011.

Now service providers are now working hard to acquire customers for their triple-play bundles, while knowing that the three screens – namely, -- TV, computer and cellular phone – will likely grow to dozens of screens with new resolution requirements.

Right now, there already are a growing number of content providers and consumer electronic technologies which have already begun to take advantage of next-generation Internet 2.0 pipes into homes.

“Carrier-based services have evolved in enterprises and the key is media mobility which involves moving content around and these are practical applications which generate revenue,” Floyd Wagoner, Motorola director, Global Product Marketing and Marketing Communications said on the sidelines of the myBroadband 2008 conference in conjunction with the ACM:2008 Expo in Kuala Lumpur in October.

Among these, video is the key application and HDTV is just beginning with resolutions growing higher and higher and video clips are being used to provide information in enterprises.

“HDTV streams require between 9 and 20 Mbps bandwidth, while a 720 x 480 resolution NTSC digital video requires between 2 and 4Mbps and Motorola has been perfecting next-generation encoding technologies over time,” said Wagoner.

A typical MPEG-2 TV video in the studio can occupy 1GB but MPEG-4 encoding can compress and bluff the viewer’s eye to believe it’s seeing a high quality image and what a viewer sees on satellite TV is only 2% of the original video.

“When high-speed broadband (HSBB) is in place, it will be able to handle new developments to come on the consumer side and on-demand video is the place to start,” said Wagoner.

Motorola has a vision of Media Mobility and provides an ecosystem to support it and enable viewers to watch video in several different ways on several different platforms and the key is to adapt and move content between these different platforms and the key here is the ability to reproduce content for access on different using different types of compression techniques.

This provides different ways for service providers to monetize their broadband connections. For example, they could offer it as a streaming video, as a video download with or without commercials, voice-over broadband or as broadcast mobile video.

“The question is how to take voice, data, video and bundle them together and operators such as Telekom Malaysia are talking of providing bundled services,” said Wagoner.

Verizon Wireless and AT&T in the United States are developing environments for content delivery, where users can select content to match their device and telcos are becoming content providers and are architecting their networks with an eye on services five years down the road.

Ultra Broadband speeds which range from 50Mbps into the tens of gigabytes is based on the carrying capacity of fibre, which is future-proof.

Meanwhile, fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) is being deployed on a mass scale in Asia, with 11 million FTTH subscribers in Japan and 30% FTTH penetration in South Korea.

“The deployment of fibre in Asia is proven, trusted, well-known and it’s a greenfield infrastructure in many parts of Asia, which is attractive due to the high cost of copper, while services around set-top boxes, TV and so on are tried and tested too” said Wagoner.

The growth of FTTH has begun to level off in South Korea and it’s expected to do the so shortly in Japan, while China is where FTTH uptake is the most aggressive, while Wagoner regards Malaysia as well placed for FTTH deployment to take off and operators here can learn from the experience of others, such as KDDI in Japan.

“However, fibre is not the only broadband medium, since it will take decades to deploy fibre everywhere, so there will be be a multitude of broadband delivery technologies, including wireless technologies such as WiMAX, HSPA, LTE and WiFi,” said Wagoner.