IMPROVING MOBILE VIDEO

As mobile technology users become more sophisticated, text messages and still images won't always suffice. Users now expect not only to have mobile video services at their disposal, but to have video with quality comparable to their TV sets at home. In response to this anticipated demand, Framingham, Mass.-based NMS Communications has built a 3G-324M circuit-switched video solution to provide a real-time two-way communications medium.

The Vision Video VoiceXML solution is designed to accelerate the development and deployment of revenue-generating voice and video applications, including video mail and voice/video messaging in 2.5G and 3G networks. NMS' solution is also designed to create a transition for enabling video in the all-IP network.

“We have, at this point, uniquely extended VoiceXML to address video functionality,” said Joel Hughes, vice president and general manager of NMS' Platform Solutions division. “We have tried to do this in a very standards-based way but, nonetheless, extending our tool kit to VoiceXML programmers to include video and providing a very highly reliable, high-density, cost-effective server platform that they can then deploy those applications on.”

The VoiceXML server reduces the effort to build, modify and maintain emerging interactive video applications such as on-demand video media distribution, video sharing or video messaging. The server also allows developers to get applications such as speech-enabled interactive voice response, voice and video messaging and conferencing to market quickly. Hughes said that an integrated approach is essential in the mobile video arena.

“Our customers are asking us for a server-level product that they could control in still a programmable fashion, but would allow them to build their complete solutions more rapidly.”

Many complaints about the early 3G video deployments on IP have been concerning the network latencies between the handset and the service platform of the network, Hughes said. “We've really integrated the video functionality into our existing highly programmable, low-latency voice service platform,” he said. “Using VoiceXML as a programming paradigm, which is comfortable and known to these developers, and integrating the platform, is, I think, how we achieve low-latency delivery of these services.”

Alan Greenberg, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research, said that the demand will increase when mobile video services become more readily available. While he agrees that the future for these capabilities is bright, he said that the heat is just being turned on. “There is a little bit of hype to it, but if people are willing to watch a video on their iPod, they are willing to watch a video on their cell phone,” Greenberg said.