In this in-depth conversation for StreamTV, Evan Shapiro speaks with Amitabh Dixit, Chief Technology Director at Nokia, about the innovations powering today’s media infrastructure—and what’s next. Dixit outlines the importance of video compression standards like H.264, H.265 and H.266 the unseen backbone enabling streaming on billions of devices worldwide. He explains why open standardization is critical for seamless content delivery and how the next leap—from 4K to 8K—will depend on breakthroughs in compression.
The discussion then turns to AI’s transformative potential for media creation, distribution, and business models, along with the urgent need for sustainable, ethical use. Dixit also shares a glimpse of immersive audio and video technologies in development, aiming to make remote interactions feel truly face-to-face.
Packed with industry insights, this interview reveals how Nokia’s deep technical expertise continues to shape the media and entertainment ecosystem of the future.
Evan Shapiro:
Hi, this is Evan Shapiro, your media cartographer for StreamTV, and today I'm lucky enough to have a conversation with Amitabh Dixit, who's the Chief Technology Director of Multimedia and New Segments at Nokia Technology. First, let's zoom back out. What the heck is Nokia Technologies?
Amitabh Dixit:
Nokia, as we know now, that transformation really started in the late 1980s when Nokia's management looked at telecommunications sector and realized there's something to this field and we should look closely at it. So we dived into it.
Evan Shapiro:
Well, let me stop you there for a second. So there's a hundred years there of evolution and continually... 3M is another company I love to point to who was in mining and then in sandpaper and now makes post-it notes and magnetic tape. But this constant quest for evolution and transformation is built into the DNA of the company. Until you see telecommunications as a futures bet and you bet on it huge, and that's the brand we all kind of know and love Nokia from at least my childhood or early adulthood
Amitabh Dixit:
At Nokia, we are big believers in open standardization, right? Standardization is the thing that makes everything click. Today we sort of take it for granted that... Let's take the example of telephony. So you can go to the market and buy any smartphone that you like. You can buy an iPhone, you can buy a Samsung, LG, no matter what. You can buy any phone in the market that you want and then you can come home and then sign up for service from any provider that you want and you just assume it's going to work. And it does, but it works because of standardization.
Evan Shapiro:
It would be craziness otherwise.
Amitabh Dixit:
Exactly. At Nokia, we've been a big believer in it and we have actually always pushed it no matter which technological field it is.
Evan Shapiro:
And it equally needs the standardizations-
Amitabh Dixit:
Absolutely.
Evan Shapiro:
... that telephony has had for standardization, particularly in one area which is compression.
Amitabh Dixit:
Absolutely. And again, just like the telephony, in the video space, let's talk televisions. I mean, you're very comfortable going and buying and picking any TV set you like, and if it's a smart TV, install Netflix or Amazon Prime video, Disney Plus, your favorite streaming app and you just fire it up and it just works, right? Standardization at work here. People know Nokia mostly for telecommunications, but the fact is that we have been involved in video R&D standardization for over three decades. I think people sort of sometimes are oblivious to video compression technology and it's simply because of how well it works. I think to me, the hallmark of a great technology is that it just simply works and it works so well that you just tend to ignore it. You don't even notice it's there.
Evan Shapiro:
And I think Silicon Valley, the television series, is the one way that perhaps the popular culture recognized the importance of video compression Pied Piper. I think it is crucial to look at Nokia's contribution to compression from the beginning days to today and understand the role you're playing today.
Amitabh Dixit:
Absolutely. And I and we as a company are extremely proud of it and the market has recognized it too. I mean, we have numerous licensees that have taken a license to our video compression patent portfolio. So there it is. I mean, that's the market recognition for it. And the video compression technology or the codec that you referred to from 2003, that's H.264 AVC, and it's a technology that is more than 20 years old. It certainly wasn't the first video codec out there, but it certainly was the first one that kind of just made it huge. And it's a testament to that success of this technology and how good it is that even more than 20 years later, practically any device that is capable of capturing video or displaying video implements H.264. I mean there are better technologies out there, more efficient, and the successor to H.264, H.265, that basically enables 4K content that we all have come to love and want so much. But still, I mean, H.264 is ubiquitous. It's just in every device.
Evan Shapiro:
It's the backbone of everything, but it's not one thing. It's the contribution of many people in an open standard progress. If you look at what's transpired in the last 20 years, you go from just the enabling of basic streaming to now a multifaceted in and out ecosystem on billions of devices, literally.
Amitabh Dixit:
Oh absolutely.
Evan Shapiro:
And to your point, someone wants video on whatever device they're on wherever they are. It just works. And that's kind of the crucial motivation, but also reason why compression of video is so important and why you spend so much time on it and why constant improving it is so crucial because the move from 4K to 8K is not going to be able to happen without greatly infinitely improving the compression technology.
Amitabh Dixit:
The ambition level between different versions or different generations of these codecs from H.264 to 5 to 6 and now to 7, is twice the compression. So if you had a piece of content that needed a hundred megabits per second to stream using H.264, then generally speaking, H.265 can accomplish the same task with similar video quality using 50 megabits per second. So half the data rate. H.266 can do it at half the rate of H.265, 25, and again, it's a huge effort. I mean, you have to think about it. The best minds in the world have worked for numerous years together to make this happen. It's no small feat.
Evan Shapiro:
But without it, the news of the day doesn't move from the broadcast studio to the mobile phone.
Amitabh Dixit:
It doesn't. It's-
Evan Shapiro:
Without it, the Marvel movies don't play on pads around the world. So it is the very infrastructure, the roads on which the content travels, and frankly the transactions travel as well. But now your company just put out a report on what I think is, and I think you also think is going to be as crucial to the next stage of evolution of media and entertainment and information, frankly, as video compression has been to the current or previous era and phone data was to the prior era to that, which is AI. You put out a report called The Changing Landscape about AI's influences on media, technology, information and data, frankly. And what my big takeaway, my big aha in reading it was that the entertainment and media world, and you use examples in telephony and in the dot-com era, the media and entertainment world is usually first to utilize new technologies in the making of content and the delivery of content. But they lag behind in adapting their business models for the true power and influence that these new technologies are going to have in the ecosystem. I found that fascinating and absolutely true, but tell us what that means when it comes to AI in particular.
Amitabh Dixit:
AI, like any other technological advancement... I mean, it's a wonderful technological advancement. I think it's one of the most exciting things that is out there right now. But at the end of the day, it's a tool. You don't make money with tools, generally speaking. A few companies that can do it, but you have to build a profitable business on top of it. Like compression. Okay, you can't sell compression, right? You have to apply it to something, create a business and have a model that can actually generates revenue for you. And we talked about the dotcom era. People had access to streaming technology. I'm like, "Okay, well that's wonderful. Let's just start streaming content. And they started streaming for free and then you can't unring that bell." People come to expect content is free. So how do you monetize, ask people to pay for something that they have been consuming for free for a long time? That's a very tough challenge. So I think that's a classic example. And we talked about in that report that you have to have that mindset from the very beginning. Here's a tool, it's a great tool, but how can we actually run a profitable business?
Evan Shapiro:
In and of itself, it's not the answer.
Amitabh Dixit:
We still have a long ways to go, right? I mean, if you look at the applications of AI, you have some really kind of exciting prospects out there. I know that some of the media houses are actually using large language models to test their storylines before investing millions and billions of dollars and actually creating a final production. So you can use LLMs to predict how successful it can be in the market or is expected to be in the market. And if you think that the level of success is not satisfactory to you, they don't have to invest that much amount of money and resources into creating that content. I think that's a power we didn't have.
Evan Shapiro:
As a tool for creativity, right? So what will win is creativity, but as a new brush stroke or as a new instrument in the orchestra, I think AI might really be a technology of the moment of the creator economy. So if you can see creators scaling up to equalize the content at a much lower price per minute and reach a level of production value that they normally couldn't afford to on their own.
Amitabh Dixit:
Absolutely. I mean, if anything, it has really democratized the content creation process. I mean, you don't need to have all this hardware and equipment and expensive setup to actually create a professional quality content. Most people can do it with the right tools. You don't need to be a media powerhouse to create a compelling piece of content that you can actually monetize. So most people can do it, and that's the beauty of AI. It can't replace creativity, but once you have a compelling story that you want to tell, like you said, AI can actually get you to the end product much faster now. And I think that's the beauty of it.
Evan Shapiro:
Yeah. Now on the flip side of that, there is the sustainable... So just like telephony and video compression and other elements of the media industrial complex modernization is really, I think, crucial, and I think you agree, and I think your report says this as well to the ethical, sustainable, and frankly practical use of AI in media data technology, correct?
Amitabh Dixit:
Absolutely. And sustainability is a topic that's very close to my heart. I try to live a sustainable lifestyle in everything, and I think we all should. It impacts all of us. And media and entertainment industry I think is responsible for more emissions than we like to admit, or that even we are aware of.
Evan Shapiro:
I think you told me that streaming video is a higher carbon footprint than the airline industry. Is that accurate?
Amitabh Dixit:
It's almost twice as much, but to be fair, I mean, most of it is attributed to the end user device viewing. A significant part of it is there, but there's some of it of course in content creation and content distribution, delivery of it. But still, it all adds up. Little things add up. I think it was a few weeks ago that OpenAI revealed that being polite to ChatGPT is costing them tens of millions of dollars. It's funny, but it's a fact.
Evan Shapiro:
I'm going to be more polite to ChatGPT.
Amitabh Dixit:
Yeah, you say please and sorry, and it's not a person. It has to process it, and it doesn't add any kind of value in terms of answer you get.
Evan Shapiro:
So many of us who might be listening or watching this right now, in 10 years time are likely to be doing something that doesn't exist today, right? So right now, I write a Substack newsletter and I'm a LinkedIn influencer. 10 years ago, go back in time, and I told myself that or other people that that's what I would be doing now, people would be like, "What the heck is a Substack?" Right? So think ahead a decade. And what do you think that the new frontier might be once we start integrating AI? Where do, what future can't we see? Should we be preparing ourselves? That's a hard question to ask, but I also think you see around corners, your company is genetically designed to see the future. So what do you see?
Amitabh Dixit:
Well, in terms of applications, I think one thing that excites me the most is the confluence of connectivity and compression. Again, one thing that's really close to my heart is bringing people together, and that's also in the DNA of Nokia. We're used to connecting people, bringing people together, making the world act together. And as someone who left his home country, moved to the United States, away from the family, staying connected to the loved ones has been very important. And we went from buying prepaid international calling cards in the early 2000s, to now making FaceTime calls or video WhatsApp calls, and almost having the feeling of being in touch with your loved ones who aren't physically far away. What I'm really excited about is this immersive experiences, which take it one step further and make you really feel like you're in the physical presence of somebody that you want to stay connected with.
And I think we are getting there with AI, with immersive video and audio technologies, and again, we didn't get a chance to talk about it, but kind of as Nokia, we do a lot of cellular, a lot of telephoning, but we also do a lot of video. We talked about it. But we do a lot of audio as well. And again, people tend to forget it, but people never consume video by itself. It's always consumed alongside audio. So I think audio is extremely important, and we have been instrumental in creating this new audio code called IVAS, Immersive Voice and Audio. It enables spatial audio. And again, along with IVAS and other immersive technologies, video codecs and audio codecs and connectivity to go along with it, because no matter how much you can compress, it's still a lot of data and you're going to need bigger and more efficient data pipes to transmit all that data. If you can get to that real physical face-to-face communication while being physically away, I would be thrilled. That's what I'm super excited about in terms of applications coming up.
Evan Shapiro:
That's amazing. That's really cool. And you can see it, because that's the stuff that you're already beginning to work on at the laboratory there, yeah?
Amitabh Dixit:
Absolutely. We have prototypes, and again, this is another thing that we do. We don't just develop technology and license it. We also do some prototyping. And we talked about it, Immersive Voice, RXRM, the immersive multimedia reality.
Evan Shapiro:
You're like the James Bond lab.
Amitabh Dixit:
Next time you visit Finland, I'd be happy to show you around and give you all these demos.
Evan Shapiro:
We talked about it. Let's find a reason for me to go to Finland. I was fishing for an invite there, so yeah, I can't wait.
Amitabh Dixit:
You have it.
Evan Shapiro:
This has been a really fascinating conversation. I can't thank you enough. We could probably keep going after we hit unrecord here, but Amitabh Dixit from Nokia Technologies, really creating intellectual property that is powering the infrastructure of the media world. Thank you so much for being here. It's been great talking to you.
Amitabh Dixit:
Pleasure is all mine, Evan. Thank you so much for your time. Absolutely, I loved it.
Evan Shapiro:
Thanks so much. For StreamTV, this is Evan Shapiro, your media cartographer.