SK Telecom and Thin Multimedia Team to Launch World's First Wireless Video Messaging Service

Business Wire, Oct 22, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 22, 2001

SK Telecom (NYSE:SKM) (www.sktelecom.com) one of the world's largest wireless telecommunications operators, and Thin Multimedia (www.thinmultimedia.com), a leading provider of mobile multimedia solutions, today announced the launch of NATE Video Mail(TM), the world's first wireless video messaging service. The wireless video messaging service enables subscribers to send video messages along with SMS messages to mobile phones. In July of this year, SK Telecom and Thin Multimedia successfully launched a multimedia service which offers subscribers more than 400 content channels, including animations, multimedia cards, movies, music videos, and TV programs. The video messaging service is an addition to the multimedia service, and both are available on both 2G and 2.5G networks.

"We expect our video messaging service to be the killer application that will make wireless video a popular and useful service for consumers of all ages. Parents of students studying abroad can use their mobile phones to see video of their children, while teenagers can send entertaining video mail to one another," said Jae Uk Lim, Manager for Video Messaging Service in the Wireless Internet Division of SK Telecom. "According to initial surveys, consumers are excited about our video messaging service and are willing to pay for it."

From anywhere in the world, SK Telecom subscribers and their friends can send video to handsets equipped with Thin Multimedia's video player, thinPLAYER(TM). The sender only needs web access and a web camera to create a video message that has a caption and an SMS message. A dozen handset manufacturers - including Motorola - currently offer such handsets. thinPLAYER(TM) supports black and white, grayscale, and up to 24-bit color imaging.

SK Telecom's video messaging service is powered by Thin Multimedia's thinVMS(TM) (Video Messaging Service) solution. ThinVMS(TM) works with the wireless operator's SMS and WAP server to first send the SMS message and later send the video if the user chooses to view the video after reading the message. thinPORTRAIT(TM) is the desktop application used to create video messages.

"thinVMS(TM) solutions enable a wireless operator to launch a wide-scale video messaging service using their existing infrastructure," explained Dr. Chuck Yoo, Founder and CEO of Thin Multimedia. "SMS servers, WAP servers and networks need no modification. Handsets need only to incorporate thinPLAYER(TM) software, which requires very little memory and can turn almost any existing handset into a video-capable handset at no additional cost."

Thin Multimedia is working with UMS and MMS technology vendors to market mobile video messaging globally. In particular, Thin Multimedia is actively targeting the European market, where entertainment companies such as movie studios and game companies are aggressively using SMS messaging to market their films, games and music to mobile phone users.

Thin Multimedia will be demonstrating their video messaging solution in booth 268 at the Streaming Media Europe 2001 conference October 23 -25 in London, England.

About SK Telecom

SK Telecom is the largest CDMA cellular service provider in the world with more than 13.4 million subscribers as of June 2001, based on the accumulated expertise for over 16 years of its state-of-the-art technological know-how in the field of wireless communications. It has diversified its business scope to IMT-2000, multimedia online service, International Call, Handset manufacturing, and GMPCS. SK Telecom is listed on the London and New York Stock Exchange Markets (NYSE:SKM). For more information on SK Telecom, visit the World Wide Web at http://www.sktelecom.com.

About Thin Multimedia

Thin Multimedia offers a comprehensive set of software-based wireless multimedia solutions including decoding, encoding, authoring, messaging and streaming that offer excellent playback quality with minimal usage of processor and battery as well as high error resilience. Thin Multimedia works with wireless operators, cell phone manufacturers, and content providers to offer consumers a variety of multimedia content and messaging services. For more information, please visit the company's website at http://www.thinmultimedia.com.