K-WILL to Showcase Video Quality Assurance Technology at NAB; Providing Forensic View at Pixel Level in Real-Time.

LAS VEGAS -- K-WILL Corporation, a company pioneering the objective measurement of digital video and audio quality, will demonstrate several new video test and measurement devices at NAB 2005 that provide a forensic view at the pixel level in real-time. K-WILL's demonstration can be seen in the Central Hall, booth C8941, in the Las Vegas Convention Center, April 18 - 21.

K-WILL equipment ensures video quality for broadcasters, network operators, cable TV companies, production companies as well as equipment manufacturers and can be used in the production, post-production and broadcast/transmission stages of the video lifecycle.

According to Dr. Takahiro Hamada, president and CEO, K-WILL, the new equipment provides reliable answers about the quality of video feeds.

"Because our systems immediately detect differences in signal quality, we provide broadcast engineers the time they need to correct problems and give them the ability to produce consistent results and real-time evaluations," he said.

K-WILL is exhibiting three categories of products at the show: Video & Audio Quality Automated Monitoring, Transport Stream (TS) Monitoring and JPEG2000 HDTV Codec & its Quality Evaluation.

Video & Audio Quality Automated Monitoring -- K-WILL's video & audio quality monitoring systems remove any concerns about the kinds of errors that can slip past human inspection. The automated "digital eyes" use simultaneous quality monitoring to inspect both digital HDTV and analog TV signals.

--QuMax-2000's flexible architecture can be customized for real-time on-air quality monitoring, dubbing and inspecting video quality written to servers. By using a flexible architecture that can be customized for applicable markets, the system can monitor quality at the macro block level through comparison among different formats, such as HDTV, SDTV, SDI & analog TV and is ideal for live on-air systems including cable, terrestrial and mobile broadcasting applications.

--Video DNA Analyzer (Software) monitors moving/live video base band quality automatically in real-time and is most effective when monitoring the quality of digital moving video that is transmitted through the networks. The analyzer calculates and saves video signal metadata input into PC for further analysis.

Transport Stream (TS) Monitoring -- K-WILL's TS monitoring systems provide real-time quality monitoring of the video elementary stream (ES).

--TSI-2000 provides centralized monitoring of video networks with automated, real-time assessment of the quality of MPEG-2 video transport streams. The system extracts video quality at the macro block level from the Elementary Stream (ES) and reports results to a PC using Ethernet networking (TCP/IP, UDP, SNMP). It also checks for ETR290 errors, allowing user to establish quality of service (QoS) for a transmission system.

--T-Max allows the customers to do error detection through real-time analysis of video and audio quality in each sequence of the ES from six programs simultaneously at the macro block level. This provides centralized monitoring of video networks with automated, real-time assessment of the quality of the video data stream.

--TS-7805 performs bit rate measurement and real-time analysis of PCR jitter. This unit is particularly useful for checks of remote connections in the transmitting system to get confirmations at the point of trouble. This portable product was developed by ASTRODESIGN, Inc. and is distributed exclusively through K-WILL Corporation.

--MEVA (Software) detects, analyzes and evaluates errors in MPEG files at a macro block level. It also displays encoding parameters on the corresponding decode videos. This software product is developed in partnership with NHK Science & Technical Research Laboratories.

JPEG2000 HDTV Codec & its Quality Evaluation -- KDDI R&D Laboratories' HDTV codec and K-WILL's quality evaluation systems evaluate picture quality of the Codec on a pixel-by-pixel basis, with less than a 50 millisecond delay during live transmissions.

--VP21H evaluates the HD/SD objective picture quality with a pixel-by-pixel comparison on a fully automated and real-time basis. The system can be used for debugging encoder/decoder operations, quality evaluation of broadcast systems, automatic dubbing, DVD authoring and DVD playback. This product was specified in ITU J.144.

--JH-2000 employs a new standard wavelet-based JPEG2000 coding technology with significantly low delay (50msec), to supply cutting-edge quality during the live transmission/delivery process. JH-2000 is developed by KDDI R&D Laboratories, Inc.

About K-WILL

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., K-WILL Corporation is pioneering the objective evaluation and measurement of digital video and audio quality through its patented technology. K-WILL is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based KDDI Media Will, a venture spinout of KDDI Corporation, the second largest telecom service provider in Japan.

K-WILL's products serve the entire video industry including content producers, professional broadcast equipment manufacturers, broadcasters, CATV companies and satellite and telecom carriers. More information can be found at www.kwillcorporation.com.