By leveraging the company's low-bit-rate coding and wireless network expertise, PacketVideo hopes the agreement with Warner Bros. will soon enable wireless carriers to offer full-motion Looney Tunes or Batman cartoons from Warner on mobile phones, personal digital assistants or Web Pads. Wireless multimedia applications, including animation, trailers, promos, short video games or video greeting cards, also are expected for delivery over the 2.5G and third-generation (3G) wireless networks.

Warner Bros. has agreed to initially create and produce four original animated series based on the studio's cartoon characters for domestic and international wireless distribution.

After delivering their goods via digital satellite, digital cable and the Internet, content owners "are now targeting the wireless market as the next big distribution outlet," said James Brailean, chief technology officer and co-founder of PacketVideo.

While a number of companies including Real Networks and Microsoft already offer streaming audio/video technologies for the Internet, few have tailored their services for the wireless market. "Nobody has built a streaming solution as comprehensive as ours, optimized for wireless networks — where channels can be easily lost, and there are huge fluctuations in available data rate," Brailean said.

PacketVideo offers underlying technologies to chip companies, handset vendors, wireless carriers and content owners, including embedded software for mobile devices, technologies for delivering multimedia over wireless networks and authoring tools to help build wireless multimedia applications.

PacketVideo's MPEG-4-compliant, software-based encoding and decoding algorithms have been ported to a number of chips. They include Intel Corp.'s StrongARM, Texas Instruments' TMS32055x DSP-based Open Multimedia Application Platform (OMAP) and Qualcomm's silicon, Brailean said.

"Many people have assumed that technologies to distribute multimedia content over the wireless network are still a couple of years away," he said. "But the socket war for silicon vendors to deliver such multimedia functions on mobile devices is already heating up."

One key technology developed by PacketVideo and put in place in the multimedia wireless access network is "our wireless edge server," said Ed Knapp, PacketVideo's senior vice president of wireless distribution. He said that PacketVideo's wireless edge server dynamically manages highly variable wireless bandwidth for streaming applications while taking advantage of MPEG-4 scalability.

Using the solution that is extremely air-resilient and scalable, "We can adjust our data rate to a particular network and offer rich content at a consistent quality," Brailean added.

For carriers, PacketVideo also offers billing and provisioning gateway technologies. Today, PacketVideo is involved in about a dozen trials to deliver multimedia content across different wireless networks, Brailean said. "Our technology is air-interface independent so that it can work over code-division multiple-access, GSM, time-division multiple-access, General Packet Radio System and Universal Mobile Telephone System."

Industry observers, however, are split in their opinions about how quickly the wireless market may embrace streaming video.

Gerry Kaufhold, principal analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group, said that by tying branded content to service providers, PacketVideo can help carriers decrease the number of users switching to another service while increasing consumers' usage time. If Japan's i-mode or Europe's GSM/GPRS are any indication, there is definitely a growing consumer demand for nonvoice applications on mobile phones, he added.

But not everyone is so optimistic. "If they are thinking that consumers are really interested in watching Looney Tunes on their phones, they are kidding themselves," said Ray Jodoin, group manager and principal analyst responsible for wireless deployment at Cahners In-Stat. "Streaming sucks up time, and minutes spent on the air won't be free."

Jodoin also expressed some concerns that the bandwidth could remain a limiting factor for wireless multimedia applications. He said bandwidth would still be limited to about 384 kbits/second, even over the 3G wireless network, if a handset to receive multimedia applications is used in a mobile environment. But if a receiver is used in a stationary setting, "It would be a whole different story," Jodoin said, because the available bandwidth could be as wide as 2 Mbits/s. With that 2-Mbit/s pipe, Jodoin said, "wireless carriers could essentially transform themselves into an Internet service provider to offer broadband applications."

Uphill fight
Jodoin warned, however, that wireless service providers could still face an uphill battle, because they compete against other broadband services including DSL, cable or MMDS.

Other issues that could slow the use of multimedia applications on the wireless market include the handset's battery life as well as its display quality.

PacketVideo's Brailean noted that not all the multimedia applications need to be viewed on a tiny screen on a handset whose battery life is obviously precious and limited. "Something like Bluetooth could help," he said, which would allow consumers to attach their cell phone to a Web Pad, which is equipped with a bigger screen and a much longer battery life.

Founded in 1998, PacketVideo has a number of engineering executives with wireless network expertise, along with 30 PhDs who focus on video compression algorithms. Many of the engineers have been active in developing the MPEG-4 standard. PacketVideo investors include CreditSuisse, First Boston, Intel Capital, Philips, Qualcomm, Sonera, Texas Instruments, Sony Corp. of America and Nexus Group.