The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has given the green light to an audio-video coding standard (AVS) developed in China.

It has been developed by a special group comprising Chinese companies, research institutions and government agencies.

Commercial use of the technology is expected to start by the end of this month with mobile TV services offered by the country's major mobile operators.

"The MII's appraisal results indicate that the AVS is mature in technology and ready for application," Huang Tiejun, secretary-general of the AVS working committee, said on Tuesday.

"We expect it to be widely used in domestic industries and hopefully become the national standard."

The AVS committee, set up in 2002 with support from the MII and the Ministry of Science and Technology, has been aiming to develop new technology in digital audio-visual coding and decoding, as the existing standards available grow obsolete.

AVS allows digital visual and audio data to be compressed so it can be stored and transmitted.

This new AVS technology will help China save more than US$1 billion in royalty fees over the coming decade, according to Huang.

Digital audio-visual coding and decoding technology is widely used in digital TVs, laser discs, digital video, video conferencing and is also needed in 3G-based data services.

It is estimated that China needs between 300 and 500 million coding chips over the next ten years to use in various multimedia digital devices.

In addition to AVS technology, a AVS-based digital audio-visual broadcasting system, compatible with the existing MPEG-2-based systems, have also been developed, backed by the Computing Institution at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

"Our successful trial with Hong Kong's 3G network paves the way for massive commercial use in the near future," said Huang.

AVS-based real-time streaming media services were applied to Hong Kong's 3G network last month. It is the first time that AVS has been successfully used in a commercial 3G network.

"We are in talks with domestic companies over possible applications," noted Huang.

"We are already cooperating with China Mobile and China Unicom, and soon we will launch AVS-based mobile TV services with them, probably by the end of this month."

However, AVS needs to be used widely for it to have been worthwhile developing, according to Sui Xueqing of the Computing Institution at CAS.

In its 11th Five-Year Guideline, China stated clearly that the development of digital audio-visual sectors would be given priority up to 2010.

The government wants to encourage self-innovation.

China Central Television (CCTV) has decided to adopt MPEG-2-based systems in its prepared HDTV (high-definition television) programs by signing deals with Toshiba and Panasonic last month.

Most domestic TV makers, including TCL, Haier and Changhong support AVS technology.

The prevailing international standard, MPEG-2, made a decade ago is now outdated, many believe.

Its upgraded version, MPEG-4, performs better, although it has been widely rejected due to high user fees.

(China Daily December 8, 2005)