Digital Fountain has announced the DF ToughStream Engine for streaming applications including IPTV and Internet TV. ToughStream provides application and equipment vendors with a way to incorporate FEC technology into streaming applications. ToughStream protects video and audio streams from common impairments including packet loss, latency and jitter and lost packets typical of IP networks, allowing reliable and efficient delivery to the end-user without interruptions.

Employing Digital Fountain's patented DF Raptor FEC technology that was standardized in 2005 by 3GPP and DVB-H, the ToughStream Engine minimizes bandwidth overhead and practically eliminates buffering delays by recovering lost packets without requiring retransmission. Any packetized stream can be protected, independent of thetype of media encoding or compression, data rate, or use of encryption.

Alternative methods for ensuring stream quality are buffering data ahead of time, which causes frustrating delays and limits the user's ability to sample numerous streams or “channel surf,” and Pro-MPEG FEC.

Prior to ToughStream, developers wishing to incorporate FEC had to understand how FEC works, create or adopt some suitable protocol and then spend months tuning to achieve the desired results. Often, such solutions were inflexible to the demands of different networks.

With ToughStream, developers are presented with a simple and familiar network socket architecture. ToughStream handles all of the complexities of FEC processing and data transport automatically.

The ToughStream Engine technology was designed to be simple for licensees to quickly integrate into a streaming solution, allowing developers to accelerate their time to market, reduce their development costs, and reduce their project risk and complexity.

For more information, visit www.digitalfountain.com.