Posted at 9:51 p.m. PDT Thursday, August 26, 1999
Video cellular phones closer to
reality
Images could be viewed on palm computers
BY JON HEALEY
Mercury News Staff Writer
Dick Tracy has a video telephone on his wrist.
PacketVideo Corp. wants to put one in your palm.
A San Diego-based start-up, PacketVideo is developing software that lets people
tune in video from the Internet on their wireless phones and hand-held computers.
The technology could help speed the arrival of ''anytime, anywhere'' Internet access, enabling people to check home or
work security cameras from a beach chair, watch video clips while standing outside a movie theater, or join video
conferences from the back of a cab.
''I didn't think this would happen for 10 years,'' said J. Gerry Purdy, president of the Mobile Insights wireless consulting firm
in Mountain View.
Industry observers agree that wireless networks are evolving, gradually taking on all the functions of their wired
counterparts. Having added simple text messaging and basic Web browsing, the next major frontier for these networks is
video.
Still, some skeptics say it's way too early to be talking about sending video through wireless phone networks. ''It's definitely
not a mainstream application in the United States in the next three to five years,'' added Ben Linder, marketing vice president
at Redwood City-based Phone.com, which makes Internet software for the mobile phone industry.
Maybe so, but that isn't stopping the 28 employees at PacketVideo -- 22 of them engineers -- from putting the finishing
touches on their first products, which are slated for field tests in October. Other companies also are eyeing the market,
ranging from tiny StreamQuest of Truckee to powerhouse RealNetworks Inc. of Seattle, the dominant provider of audio
and video players on the Internet. ''It's safe to say this is going to be a very robust space,'' said Jim Ryan, director of
product management for data services at Sprint PCS.
Sprint plans to launch its wireless Internet service next month, and Ryan said a number of companies have been
confidentially demonstrating ways to send audio and video over that network.
Video over the Internet doesn't yet match the picture quality of broadcast television, and when it first comes out, the same
will be true for video over a wireless Internet link. But PacketVideo chief executive James Carol said that the point is not to
duplicate TV, but to open a whole new channel for video, with a new set of portable ways to display it.
PacketVideo chief technologist Jim Brailean said that major studios are already developing wireless video programming,
such as movie trailers and interactive online games. ''In the near future,'' Carol said, ''we'll see a variety of video-enabled
mobile Internet access devices that road warriors can use to keep in touch with their families and offices.''
Advantages over TV
StreamQuest founder Jonathan Sass said that the main attraction of wireless Internet audio and video is that users will have
much more control over what they hear and see, unlike the case with radio and TV broadcasts.
''Customized content is really what it's about, and information on demand,'' he said.
For example, a New York Yankees fan visiting the Bay Area might want to tune in an Internet ''Webcast'' of the Yankees
playing the Boston Red Sox instead of a local broadcast of the Giants or A's. Sass said the same kind of alternatives would
be available in other types of programming as well.
Today, though, most hand-held devices aren't ready for video. For example, the screens on 3Com's popular Palm
organizers aren't detailed enough to display PacketVideo's pictures, nor are those on most cell phones. And although
electronics companies are developing tiny cameras to add to cell phones and hand-held computers, the devices aren't
powerful enough yet to transmit video signals wirelessly.
Laptop computers have the necessary horsepower, and they can in fact send and receive video over some wireless
networks today. The problem comes when the laptop is moving, which makes it much harder to maintain a steady video
feed.
One of the key elements of PacketVideo's software is its ability to tolerate such vagaries, said Brailean, who helped develop
a leading motion picture industry standard for image compression.
Mobile phone revolution
Delivering video signals is a far cry from what mobile-phone networks were designed to do. For more than a decade they
transmitted only speech, at times unrecognizably.
Most wireless networks have been upgraded over the past year to handle data transmissions, such as text messages, and
connect to the Internet. But the wireless pipeline is still quite small, even a phone line isn't big enough to do a good job
transmitting video files, which contain huge amounts of information.
That's why video ''streamed'' over the Internet doesn't look nearly as good as it does on TV. Unless the viewer has a
high-speed connection, the pictures are small, jumpy and blotchy.
PacketVideo's software produces what you might expect from Internet video, only without the severe herky-jerky skips and
jumps that plague low-speed connections. As a recent demonstration showed, the picture is small, but it doesn't look out of
place on the small screen of a hand-held computer. And the audio remains clear and in sync with the video, even when the
picture can't quite keep up with the action on screen.
The picture quality is directly related to the speed of the Internet connection, so the results will improve as the wireless
networks boost their ability to move data. Still, those improvements are one to five years away, analysts and industry
officials say.
That's why StreamQuest, which is developing a way to transmit audio signals from the Internet wirelessly to hand-held
computers, doesn't plan to come out with products until well into 2000, Sass said.
Originally, PacketVideo planned to wait until the so-called third-generation of mobile-phone networks, which aren't
expected to appear before 2003.
These next-generation networks will be able to move data more than 100 times faster than today's speediest wireless
network.
The company lined up support in January from two Santa Clara high-tech companies, Intel Corp. and Siemens Mustang
Ventures, the investment arm of the German telecommunications giant. Five months later, however, another wireless-data
software company asked PacketVideo to try adapting its approach to low-speed wireless connections.
After a feverish weekend of work, Carol said, the company came up with a way to transmit video wirelessly at 14,400 bits
per second -- the speed that both Sprint's soon-to-be-launched network and AT&T's wireless data service could handle.
The images are transmitted at a rate of five per second, which is one-sixth the rate of television images.
The software can deliver higher quality images over faster connections, such as the wireless Internet service provided by
Metricom of Los Gatos.
PacketVideo hopes to sell its software to companies with video-studded Web sites, portable device manufacturers and
wireless phone companies, which could pass some of those costs on to consumers. Wireless data charges vary from
network to network, with some charging by the minute and others offering monthly flat rates.
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