What is H.264

The continuous growth of the available throughput, specially in the uplink of mobile phone networks is opening the doors to new services and business opportunities without references in the past. In more concrete, new standards HSDPA/HSUPA, introduced to complement and enhance 3G networks, together with the advances in audio and specially video coding, like those adopted by the standard H.264 AVC have boosted the appearance of a new service: exploiting the mobile telephony networks for contributing broadcast quality videos. This new service is offering just now a low cost, high flexibility alternative that, in a brief period of time, will substitute the current Electronic News Gathering (ENG) Units, giving rise to what is being to be called Wireless Journalism (WENG1 or WiNG2). This chapter discusses both the technologies involved and the business opportunities offered by this sector. Once reviewed the state of the art, different solutions will be compared, some of them recently appeared as commercial solutions, like QuickLink 3.5G Live Encoder3 or AirNow!4 and others still in research and development processes.