SPIRIT DSP is the World’s Largest VVoIP Enabling Technology Provider Powering More than 1 Billion Users in over 100 Countries

July 16, 2012 – SPIRIT DSP, the world’s #1 voice and video over IP (VVoIP) engines provider, announced today that its TeamSpirit® Engines powers more than 1 billion users of IP-communications channels worldwide. SPIRIT’s calculations are based on its customers’ quarter royalty reports for 2011 and public data from the past 12 months. As the largest VVoIP enabling technology provider worldwide, SPIRIT leads this market over any other VoIP provider, including popular alternative OTT (Over-the-Top) providers like Skype and Google.

SPIRIT’s direct customers, including Apple, Adobe, AT&T, British Telecom, China Mobile, Ericsson, Huawei, HTC, Korea Telecom, LG U+, Microsoft, Oracle, Polycom, Rostelecom, Samsung, Skype, ZTE and more than 250 other American, European and Asian companies, are using TeamSpirit Engines and other SPIRIT voice and video products inside their software and hardware products to offer their customers HD-quality voice and video calls across multiple IP-communication platforms and networks.

“The growth of the mobile VoIP, PC video calling and video conferencing market is skyrocketing and we’re pleased that global service providers, OEMs and application developers have selected and use SPIRIT Engines to deliver an HD-quality calling experience to their more than 1 billion mobile and PC customers worldwide. This phenomenal traction underscores that today’s global IP communication players now recognize that communication quality is crucial for consumers and businesses,” said SPIRIT’s Chairman Andrew Sviridenko.

With the rapidly rising popularity of VVoIP services on smartphones and tablets, new VoIP start-ups have emerged, like Viber and WhatsApp. Viber has shown fast traction as a newcomer, reporting 70 million mobile VoIP users acquired during 18 months without any marketing budget.1

In 2011, a new trend began with traditional telecom operators, including AT&T, China Mobile, Korea Telecom, LG U+ and others launching their own branded VVoIP services. Since 2005, telcos were only trying to block Skype and Google on their networks to avoid eroding their valuable voice minutes but they were not trying to launch their own competing VoIP services, until recently.

According to Apple, the number of iOS-powered mobile platforms (including iPhone and iPad) reached 350 million in 2012. SPIRIT software powers voice communication and music playback in Apple’s mobile devices.2

SPIRIT’s voice engine is also used by the world’s largest mobile communications service provider China Mobile, who reported in Dec. 2011 that more than 500 million mobile subscribers use its Fetion product (known today as Feiliao) with SPIRIT voice engine inside.3

SPIRIT’s Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean mobile device manufacturer customers include Acer, Arima, Compal, HTC, Huawei, iRiver, LG, Quanta, Samsung, ZTE and others. Together, they serve over 100 million smart phone users.

Huawei holds the number two position in the world among mobile infrastructure providers for telcos. SPIRIT voice and video engines on different mobile platforms (including iOS and Android) and PCs are part of Huawei’s hardware and software products that are sold to dozens of telco operators in many countries, who together serve more than 100 million users.

As of March 2012, more than 10 million users worldwide play World of Warcraft by Blizzard, an online game with SPIRIT’s voice inside.4

Russian IM service QIP, which is based on SPIRIT’s voice engine, has nearly 15 million users (as of Jan. 2012).5

The total number of VoIP users by industry giants Skype, Google and Microsoft ­ the software companies that developed their own VoIP products and engines ­ is less than the total number of channels powered by SPIRIT software.

Although Google has claimed to embed communication features into Google+ (which is used by 150 million people)6 and Gmail (425 million users)7, its VoIP products combined (Google Voice and Google Talk)8 have less than 10 million users.

In 2010, Google bought Global IP Solutions (GIPS), a public California-based company that focused on developing and licensing voice engines since 1999. Today, the Google-owned voice engine (which includes the ex-GIPS engine inside based on previous licenses) is used by AOL,9 Yahoo,10 ICQ11, Mail.ru12 in their IMs, as well as WebEx13 (less than 159 million users altogether).

SPIRIT’s 1 billion users are calculated even without taking into account computers powered by Adobe Flash, which also has SPIRIT’s voice products inside.

SPIRIT voice products are used both in the Adobe Connect collaboration product and in Adobe Flash (starting from Flash version 10.3). Adobe licensed SPIRIT’s complete voice engine in 2007 but later decided not to make Flash a full-featured VoIP application, as the company saw no good VoIP monetization model for Flash. Instead, Adobe uses select components of SPIRIT’s voice engine in its Flash and Connect products. According to Adobe, its Flash product is installed on more than 1.5 billion computers worldwide.14

Microsoft and Skype are independent developers of two proprietary (and still not compatible) voice engines. After licensing a voice engine in 2005, Microsoft developed its own engine, which is not being licensed out, and powers products that haven’t gained mass popularity yet, such as Microsoft Lync, which provides only 3 million15 voice channels and Windows Live Messenger  used by almost 250 million people.16

Skype licensed voice engines in both 2003 and 2005, and then bought start-up company Camino Networks (created by former GIPS employees) in 2006. After that, Skype developed its own voice engine, which is not being licensed out. Today, Skype is used by 250 million17 people. Among them, less than 10 million18 are paid users. In terms of total communication channels, SPIRIT outnumbers Skype. Skype also licensed SPIRIT’s video product.

It’s hard to calculate the exact number of IP-communication channels of a platform due to the dynamic nature of VoIP calls. About 90 percent of all SPIRIT customers, including Microsoft, HTC, Korea Telecom, Kyocera, LG, LG U+, Polycom, Rostelecom, Samsung, Texas Instruments, ZTE and more than 200 other companies, pay royalties and report on the number of licenses used quarterly. However, some large SPIRIT customers, including Apple, Adobe, AT&T, China Mobile, Huawei, Oracle and Skype, have licensed SPIRIT’s products either for a fixed up-front fee or make fixed annual payments; therefore, they do not report the number of licenses actually used, leaving SPIRIT to rely on public data to calculate the number of channels for these companies, instead of quarterly royalty reports.

TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engines support both RCS-e and VoLTE. The engines include resource-efficient HD voice and video codecs, echo and noise cancelling (AEC), automatic voice and video rate selection (ARS), packets delays mitigation, speech enhancement, network adaptation, voice and video synchronization, a dozen of standard digital telephony functions and more. In addition to a dozen of ITU-T standard G.7xx and H.26x codecs included in the engine, SPIRIT also offers its own industry leading IP-MR™ (IETF 6262) adaptive and error-resilient HD voice codec that has been selected by Tier1 telecom operators to deliver HD voice to millions of their VAS services users. TeamSpirit uses H.264SVC and VP8 video codecs. TeamSpirit Voice&Video Conferencing Engine is an additional server-side module bringing all the power of TeamSpirit’s robust high-quality calling to centralized communication scenarios. TeamSpirit Conferencing powers SPIRIT’s VideoMost software for massively multipoint videoconferencing. SPIRIT video engines are available on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and allow users of smartphones, tablets and notebooks across different OSs to make video calls from iPhone to Android smartphones to PC, as well as participate in HD video conferencing with automatic quality adaptation to specific network conditions, screen size and processing power.

About SPIRIT

SPIRIT DSP is the world’s #1 voice and video over IP engines provider. SPIRIT’s innovative carrier-grade voice and video software platform allows carriers, OEMs and software developers to deliver superior quality and integrated voice and video over IP services for telcos, cable and mobile service providers, enterprises, internet portals and social networks. More than 1 billion channels in over 100 countries are based on SPIRIT’s platforms. SPIRIT software platforms power popular products from Apple, Adobe, ARM, AT&T, Blizzard, BT, China Mobile, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, HTC, Huawei, KT, Kyocera, LG U+, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Polycom, Radvision, Samsung, Skype, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Veraz, Viber, ZTE, among 250+ others. SPIRIT’s direct OEM customers jointly exceed 60 percent of the global smartphone market share. videomost.us is the SPIRIT spin-off for multi-point video-web-conferencing service, competing against US-based Vidyo. For more information, visit www.spiritdsp.com.

TeamSpirit® is a registered trademark and IP-MRTM is a trademark of SPIRIT DSP. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.

1 “With 70 Million Registered Users, Viber Brings Beta Apps To BlackBerry, Windows Phone,” TechCrunch, May 8, 2012.

2 “WWDC: Apple Announces iOS 6, Shows Off In-house Maps App,” DailyTECH, June 11, 2012.

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8 “As Brizzly Enters Its Final Hibernation, AOL Tries To Sharpen Its Social Media Claws,” TechCrunch, March 2, 2012.

9 “As Brizzly Enters Its Final Hibernation, AOL Tries To Sharpen Its Social Media Claws,” TechCrunch, March 2, 2012.

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11 “As Brizzly Enters Its Final Hibernation, AOL Tries To Sharpen Its Social Media Claws,” TechCrunch, March 2, 2012.

12 “Mail.Ru Group,” Mail.Ru website, accessed July 13, 2012.

13 “Cisco WebEx,” Cisco WebEx website, accessed July 13, 2012.

14 “Adobe Flash Statistics: PC penetration,” Adobe website, accessed July 13, 2012.

15 “Microsoft Lync Showing Growth,” RedmondMag.com, Dec. 1, 2011.

16 “As Brizzly Enters Its Final Hibernation, AOL Tries To Sharpen Its Social Media Claws,” TechCrunch, March 2, 2012.

17 “Skype CEO Tony Bates confirms 250m monthly users, talks Microsoft partnership and future plans,” Engadget, May 31, 2012.

18 “Skype Statistics,” Statistic Brain,” March 28, 2012.