A flurry of announcements Friday brought European mobile users one step closer to watching video broadcasts on their handsets. In three separate announcements:
- Handset manufacturers Nokia Corp., Motorola Inc., Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and NEC Corp. will cooperate to create a standard that will allow users to watch television on several different types of handsets. Working under the Open Mobile Alliance, the companies will work to determine what needs must be met to bring broadcast services to handsets and to open the market for mobile services and terminals.
- British carrier O2 and broadcast technology provider NTL will partner on a trial in Oxford, United Kingdom, that will provide 500 consumers with 16 channels of sports, news, music and soap operas. The service, which will start early next year and will be available on Nokia handsets, marks the United Kingdom’s first public trial of multi-channel broadcasts to mobile phones.
- Lastly, Hutchison 3G Austria announced that it has tapped mobile video provider Anystream to deliver multimedia services to Austrian consumers. Anystream will provide video-to-handset content encoding for Hutchison’s video offerings, taking footage from sources such as MTV and Universal Music and immediately encoding and delivering for routing to end users via Anystream’s Agility software. Similar Agility installations are used by 3 U.K. and Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. Hong Kong.
