WIRELESS VIDEO
Some people are drawn to the tough problems. Jim Brailean has been working to stream video to your cell phone for more than a decade - first as a research engineer at Motorola, now as CEO of San Diego-based PacketVideo. His partner, company cofounder Jim Carol, calls this "the heavy lifting of wireless": sending digital video - normally delivered at 7,200 kilobits per frame, 30 frames per second - over inherently unstable networks that even in theory will deliver no more than 300 kilobits per second. There's no shortage of people who'd like to do this, from the German media moguls behind Worldzap, a startup that hopes to transmit match highlights to soccer fanatics, to the Warner Bros. execs who dream of running movie trailers on cell phones, then directing people to the nearest theater and selling them tickets. Analysts say it will be years before these things can be done well, yet Brailean keeps pushing ahead.
In the three years since its inception, PacketVideo has delivered the technology to make wireless video possible - an authoring tool to encode it, a server to deliver it, and a player to receive it. Siemens has incorporated the server software in the next-generation equipment it's selling to mobile carriers. The player is built into Compaq's Pocket PC and similar gadgets from Hewlett-Packard and Casio; it's also in next-gen devices made by Mitsubishi and Sharp for Europe, as well as by NEC and Sanyo for Japan. NTT DoCoMo, the dominant wireless carrier in Japan, is working with PacketVideo to stream video over the world's first high-speed, third-generation network, which DoCoMo has scheduled for commercial launch this fall.
PacketVideo landed nearly $100 million in financing last spring from the likes of Intel, Motorola, Siemens, Qualcomm, and Sun. Unlike VCs, these companies are more interested in jump-starting the market than in making their money back; the delays plaguing 3G networks like DoCoMo's lend urgency to the effort. "Carriers can't stall if customers are demanding applications that require bandwidth," says Paul Jacobs, president of the Internet and Wireless Group at Qualcomm, whose patents govern much of the tech behind 3G.
Few customers are demanding wireless video at the moment, but PacketVideo has formed partnerships with companies like Worldzap and Warner Bros. to develop services consumers might eventually want, and the company has conducted field trials with dozens of carriers, from China Mobile to Finland's Sonera. The results are mixed: News seems to be popular in short bites, but soccer highlights and movie trailers have too many jump cuts to work on most networks deployed today. For the near term, wireless video will be limited to applications that run at 5 to 10 frames per second - like traffic cams that show you whether the freeway is clogged. "The mobile video industry is taking its early steps," says Jussi Koski of Sonera. "No technology is ready yet."
That it's progressed this far is largely thanks to Brailean. From 1993 to 1998, he chaired a crucial subcommittee of the Moving Picture Experts Group, the international body that sets the MPEG standards for compressing and decompressing digital multimedia - most recently the MPEG-4 spec, which is optimized for wireless. Brailean's team focused on error resilience - the ability to recover from the kinds of problems mobile networks have all the time, like dropping packets of data into the ether. In 1998, after visiting the lab outside Tokyo where DoCoMo was testing 3G, Brailean decided that wireless video would someday be huge. Only a few dozen people on the planet had any experience with it, and he knew them all. He broached the idea to partner Jim Carol, then a gung-ho Motorola marketing exec, and PacketVideo was born.
PacketVideo's technology is based on the open MPEG-4 standard, but it relies on several patents to boost its performance. MPEG-4 allows the server to slow the data speed automatically if the network gets jammed; the videostream may turn into a slide show when things gets rough, but it won't jerk to a halt as it does with the proprietary, PC-based media players from RealNetworks and Microsoft. PacketVideo software is also able to conceal screwups that occur when data is lost in transmission, so it won't suddenly fritz out either.
Yet quality is no guarantee of success - and while PCs can store all the media players you want, wireless devices have room for just one. Both RealNetworks and Microsoft have revamped their media players for wireless use - which means a standards war is in the offing. Hence the real significance of the technology PacketVideo is testing with DoCoMo: Unlike earlier offerings, this is designed to stream video encoded in any format to any wireless device that meets the international standards for 3G, regardless of which player it might come with. The next move will come from Seattle.
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