Packetvideo

The Company:

Packetvideo has been around approximately two years and have grown to 270 people (based mainly out of San Diego). They have an applications development and content management office in LA which is run by an ex-Sony executive and satellite offices in NY, Chicago, Tokyo, London, Seoul and Shanghai.

The Product:

Their main area of development is on the software side - providing end-to-end solutions from encoder through to decoder for serving content over the digital wireless network. Currently their player is available for the PalmPC (Compaq iPaq, Casiopea etc.) and they have been working with application developers and device manufacturers for the last year doing trials of their software. Notable examples of this include Sonera in Finland who trialed the software in a test exercise called 'Mspace' (http://www.ecompany.com/articles/mag/0,1640,8805,00.htm) and Sprint (http://www.telecomclick.com/magazinearticle.asp?magazineid=7&releaseid=2053&magazinearticleid=12186) as well as NTTDoCoMo in Asia.

The Competition:

Packetvideo are not the only company betting on the need for video streaming software in the mobile market - the most prolific player in this area (and a good money earner for the .com share speculation comunity) has been GeoInteractive. GeoInteractive have been going since 1994, and in the streaming media market since 1996 when they started on the web with light weight audio and video players. They have since migrated this knowledge to the wireless market, providing as PacketVideo do, both client and back end systems for encoding and decoding as well as content management applications and messaging applications.

The interesting difference between the two is that GeoInteractive have recently partnered with Samsung to put their decoding technology directly onto a chip, rather than running as software on top of other chip architectures (more on that in a minute)

The Problems with Mobile Streaming:

A lot of the problems with mobile streaming are fairly obvious - namely currently low bandwidth, screen size, colour, battery consumption - however one of the biggest areas of discussion at the moment is what chip setup will work best with mobile streaming. PacketVideo have signed up with TI, Intel and Lucent and believe that their strategy of adapting the PacketVideo system to a widely used set of DSPs (Digital Signal Processor Chips) will enable them to expand into the handset much quicker than only running their platform on single processor families such as ARM and StrongARM RISC cores.

GeoInteractive have gone a slightly different strategy by optimizing the hardware itself to run with their decoding software through their chip architecture venture with Samsung. From Geo's site (http://www.emblaze.com):

"On June 5, 2000 GEO announced the signing of another deal with Samsung Electronics for the implementation of GEO's EmblazeTM A3 into Samsung cellular handsets. The A3 is an ASIC chip that enables two-way video communication (encoding / decoding). The chip is a hardware manifestation of the EmblazeTM Wireless technology and represents a world breakthrough in embedded video mobile architecture. According to the agreement, Samsung will pay GEO a $6m license and development fee, and royalties from A3 handset sales worldwide. In addition, GEO will benefit from sales of the EmblazeTM backend systems that enable A3 level services for Telecom companies, cellular operators and content providers - systems that will be co-marketed and heavily promoted by both companies."

Feel free to post back any thoughts, discussions or areas about this topic that would be good for the forum

Alex

Alex Judd
CTO
Snaz Commerce Solutions
http://www.snaz.com/
Tel. + 44 (0) 207 251-3477
Fax + 44 (0) 207 251-3484
Mob + 44 (0) 7971 052 642

On 15:13:57 14 December 2000 strowens wrote:
>Who's come across Packetvideo? They're a heavily-backed,
>US-based corporation aiming to set the default encoding,
>delivery and decoding standards of broadband content
>through mobile devices. Their proprietary PVPlatform
>solution spans wireless networks - from today's 2G thro'
>2.5 to 3G - can scale to support varying data rates (from
>9.6kbps to 384kbps) and seems to play strongly on its
>error resilience. Looks v interesting. I had a meeting
>with someone working with them last week. Anyone got any
>more info???