MWC: PacketVideo extends live TV to the iPhone

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PacketVideo (PV) is extending its mobile video application support to the Apple iPhone 3G, making live television the latest service that Apple could gain from a partner. PV will provide the integration for individual operator’s own TV and video services on the smartphone, accessible through the iPhone application store.

While YouTube is a staple of the iPhone home screen and apps that provide streaming video clips exist through the app store, true live or on-demand TV is still not an option, yet most of Apple’s carrier partners enable this for other handsets in their portfolio. Joel Espelien, PV’s chief business officer, said that the company works closely with its operator customer base and is adding iPhone support to fill in this gap in the market. Although it has yet to announce any of Apple’s carrier partners as customers for the service, operators who do institute the app will be able to offer live, local TV channels and on-demand video clips through their own electronic programming guide. The service is powered by PV’s CORE software platform, already available in 320 million mobile phones worldwide.

“Literally, everything in the app comes from PV,” Espelien said. “We are running on the iPhone OS, but we’re not relying on any help or assistance from Apple. There are no tricks, no smoke and mirrors. It’s a 100% integrated app and has a very slick channel wheel and program guide with the touch screen. The app connects directly to the source where they are streaming from. We do all the streaming, decoding and rendering of video on the phone.”

Espelien said mobile TV is a simple concept, but one that is complex in execution. PV is agnostic to the format of video and can also support MobiTV, a popular unicast service that AT&T uses for mobile TV in the U.S. PV is still working through the final details of submitting the app through Apple and has to decide if it will submit each carrier-branded version separately or as one standard app. Espelien said it is essentially the same code for each carrier, but with a few differences, including the language of the service.

“Our notion is that most operators already have a backend up,” Espelien said. “The point is to enable the device, not to provide yet another live TV service that competes with what they already have. They already have a live TV experience, and they’ve already made huge investments in everything. They’ve made a major investment and want to protect it.”

The business model is up to the carrier, but it’s likely the carrier-branded PV app will be provided free to the consumer in the iPhone app store with the service costing the same subscription price the service provider typically charges on its mobile TV-enabled handsets.

As a member of the Open Handset Alliance, PV also today launched its OpenCORE 2.0 software for Google’s Android platform. The upgrade will enable Android devices to play and stream standard formats, record images and video and support video telephony through OpenMAX. The new video telephony feature incorporates a two-way engine for circuit-switched video telephony based on the 3G-324M protocol, as well as support for encoders over the OpenMax IL API.

“On the first Android phone, the G1, folks may have noticed it didn’t include the video capture, camcorder app, and the reason for that is the hardware accelerometer APIs weren’t done from the underlying hardware platform there,” Epselien said. “Between HTC and Google, they choose to not turn that feature on, but that capability has been in our software from day one with OpenCORE. We worked on a standard called OpenMAX, so you should see that camcorder functionality in most, if not all, new Android handsets coming out based on this new release.”