MOSCOW:   SPIRIT DSP, the world’s top voice and video over IP engines provider, announced today that LG U+, South Korean’s leading mobile and telecommunications service provider (formerly known as LG Telecom) has licensed SPIRIT’s TeamSpirit® Voice&Video Engine Mobile to power HD-quality VoIP and video-calling on mobile devices.

South Korea has one of the world’s most vibrant IP Communications markets in the world backed by strong support from the government. A dedicated area zone for VoIP telephone numbers was introduced several years ago, followed by a number portability option that made it possible for people to move to VoIP-calling without changing their phone number.  A wide mobile VoIP adoption thanks to a great wireless broadband infrastructure, new smartphones from Korean handset OEM giants and high smartphone adoption rates were recently reported by the Korea Communications Commission (KCC). In just 18 months, the number of smartphone subscribers in South Korea has exploded more than ten-fold to top 10 million (or around a fifth of the population) stimulating local carriers to deploy their own mobile VVoIP (voice and video over IP) services to retain their customers from migrating to Skype and Google mobile voice and video services.

“SPIRIT DSP has a strong presence in Asia Pacific market and S. Korea.  LG U+ has come to rely on SPIRIT’s proven and highly optimized, carrier-grade engine technology to handle voice and video over IP processing,” said SPIRIT’s VP Sales Alex Kravchenko.  “We’re pleased to continue our cooperation with LG U+ and maintain our critical role in bringing South Korean mobile users the highest quality communications experience possible.”

TeamSpirit Engine is an SDK for real-time IP calling/conferencing communications, allowing application developers and service providers to offer superior quality voice and video products to millions of global users.  TeamSpirit Engine software uniquely combines scalable echo- and noise-free audio with scalable video, a necessary marriage to ensure the highest quality conferencing experience. TeamSpirit enables many hours of battery life in wideband talk mode. The voice engine includes highly optimized standard voice codecs and a patent-free wideband error-resilient scalable SPIRIT IP-MRTM voice codec (IETF RFC 6262).  The video engine includes SPIRIT’s H.264 scalable video codec that is able to adapt streams to each peer’s network and PC environments without heavy transcoding and it includes a multi-component stream protection module that compensates for network jitter and packet loss.