At the 3GSM conference this week in Barcelona, Spain, a mobile broadcast company - Penthera Technologies Inc. (Pittsburgh, PA; http://www.penthera.com/) is showing a lossless, trickle-to-hard disk technology that has the potential to render wireless channel escalation for mobile video content moot. The company claims it can increase existing wireless bandwidth using this method by 100:1. They also say the technique, called Mediacast, works over any digital network including DVB-H, T-DMB, DAB-IP, ISDB-T, DVB-T, S-DAB, and 802.16e (mobile WiMax).

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
Projection Monthly

Based on the confluence of economic realities - plunging flash storage costs, and the billions of US$ needed for a mobile video network build-out, PVR functionality in cell phones and other mobile devices (iPods etc.) offers a viable alternative to most live streaming media content.

In practice, content can be bifurcated into critical real-time data like traffic updates and the latest sports scores, and stock prices vs. non-time sensitive video content that doesn’t need to be streamed real-time.

Penthera is seizing on this reality with the introduction of its Mediacast, allowing mobile TV broadcasters to shift from live streaming of TV and radio to broadcasting media files for storage and later playback on client devices. The company’s CTO Adam Berger said, "Penthera technology solution allows a broadcaster to deliver 1000 channels where once only 10 could fit. This is where mobile TV needs to be to reach mass adoption."

Mediacast is based on DF Raptor FEC (forward error correction) technology from Digital Fountain (Fremont, CA; www.digitalfountain.com). It is billed by the company as "The world’s most advanced forward error correction (FEC) code for streaming media and data distribution applications." Raptor recovers lost data packets without requiring retransmission from the sender, according to the company, and can fill in for several minutes of lost signal.

DF Raptor provides reliability in data networks using code that works like a "water fountain" producing an endless supply of data that can generate an unlimited number of encoded output symbols, any of which can be used to recover the original input symbols. (Don’t ask how it works - its magic.)

The company said its technology could be employed at the application or transport layer to provide reliability to data communications, protecting streaming media or data distribution applications from the effects of packet loss no matter what the source.

Our take: Any alternative to spending billions of dollars on a global network build-out, wireless spectrum acquisition and content deals with Hollywood needs serious consideration in the face of lackluster adoption of mobile video services.

Did I say lackluster? EE Times reported today at that same 3GSM conference, the Chief Marketing Officers Council (CMO), in a Monday (Feb. 12) forum announced that mobile TV adoption was at a paltry 7% in popularity, that’s next to last place among all existing mobile services, behind gambling (at 8%).

This is hardly the kind of subscriber embrace that gives the product planners over at MediaFLO a warm fuzzy feeling - but in all fairness, there are regions (S. Korea) where mobile TV is thriving. Add to this however, the growing trend of viewing mobile video indoors (UMTS Forum reported early trial results showing 50 to 75% want this) and network build-out cost escalate even higher.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a believer in mobile video content (but in a much different form than is being proposed today). Nevertheless, if Penthera’s 100-fold increase in existing capacity is real, the potential savings could be a windfall for the wireless industry, leveraging existing 3G capacity and help jump-start the movement in a direction consumers are already headed - high capacity storage of media files for anytime viewing. While it doesn’t take a visionary to see the future in wireless is mobile video, the exact form and function - particularly the delivery - is still a bit cloudy.