PacketVideo Sees Solid Growth for Mobile Multimedia in 2007; Emphasizes Ease of Use in 2008

Business Wire, Dec 10, 2007

Year Starts with Mobile TV Innovations and Closes with Android Announcement

SAN DIEGO -- The global mobile multimedia industry made solid progress in 2007, and that progress mostly came from mobile operators honing their established service offerings and improving the end-user experience, according to PacketVideo (PV), the multimedia software company whose software now powers more than 170 million multimedia mobile devices worldwide.

PV, a subsidiary of NextWave Wireless Inc. (NASDAQ:WAVE), supplies the multimedia software that enables such services as Verizon Wireless' VCAST music and video services, NTT DoCoMo's 3G FOMA service and Orange's Orange World services. In 2008, PV will enter its 10th year of designing and delivering mobile media solutions.

"Over the past decade, we've witnessed a lot of good technologies and services that ran their course very quickly. Increasingly, those that stick are the services that consider the end-user," said PV CEO James C. Brailean, Ph.D. "It's more than just streaming a song or a video clip. Multimedia services are becoming highly sophisticated and feature-rich. In 2007, ease of use became critical for a service to get any kind of traction with consumers."

PV's focus in 2007 was doing just that: inventing and improving multimedia software solutions to enhance adoption of mobile media services.

"Different regions emphasized different media functions this year," said Brailean. "With our North American customers, we launched some significant upgrades to music services, telling us that the mobile phone is gaining traction as a favored personal audio device. In Japan, we enabled DoCoMo customers to better enjoy Internet-based media with the introduction of phones fully capable of playing back virtually any Internet-based video. And our European customers asked us to create new ways for their end-users to store and manage different forms of digital content for easy access from their mobile phones."

Some of the key developments for PV in 2007:

January - Fast Channel Changing: PV debuted its fast channel change technology, which enables users of DVB-H live TV services to change channels in under 200 milliseconds, compared to up to six seconds for standard DVB-H solutions.

February - New Digital Rights Management Options: PV was the first to demonstrate publicly the versatile digital rights management system from Microsoft called PlayReady. PlayReady, along with PV's own digital rights management system called Secure Digital Container (SDC), enables multiple business models, including superdistribution of content and over-the-air content license acquisition.

March - MediaFusion[TM] Unified Client-Server: PV introduced its MediaFusion white label client-server solution to create an integrated media on-device portal. MediaFusion will be deployed next year by multiple mobile operators. With MediaFusion, mobile media services have a more elegant and user-friendly way to search and access multimedia content while creating new merchandising opportunities.

April - PV Shows MediaFLO's Openness: PV was the first to demonstrate publicly the mobile broadcast TV platform MediaFLO on a reference device with a third-party application processor, showing that it is indeed an open standard.

October - PVConnect[TM] Links the Home Network with the Mobile Phone: PV demonstrated publicly its PVConnect media server software that enables the seamless sharing of content, such as music, photos and video, between a variety of compatible devices including mobile phones. PVConnect had a number of design wins this year, including media storage devices made by HP, Cisco-Linksys and LaCie.

November - PV is a Founding Member of the Open Handset Alliance: PV supplies the multimedia subsystem for the Android media device platform, an open-source initiative led by Google. PV is one of 34 industry heavy-hitters who founded the Open Handset Alliance.

November - PV Adds 14 New Handsets to its DoCoMo Deployments: With the release of 14 new phones, PV brought the total of PV-powered multimedia handsets deployed by its customer NTT DoCoMo to 54.

In 2008: PV was the first company to bring video to cell phone back in 1998 and plans to continue its streak of mobile multimedia innovations in 2008. Among the innovations to debut is the introduction of a new way to deliver mobile TV broadcasts to handsets, to be previewed at the Mobile World Congress show in February.

"Some industry watchers are saying 2007 was a quiet year for mobile media, but we saw it more as a transition year," said Brailean. "Multimedia services have entered the consumer mainstream. We're looking forward to the launch of a number of new, flexible, and more importantly, easy-to-use mobile media services next year."

About PV: PV, a subsidiary of NextWave Wireless Inc. (NASDAQ:WAVE), is the software innovator powering the world's leading mobile multimedia services. With more than 250 different devices supported and 170 million PV multimedia clients deployed around the world, PV has the deepest, broadest and most respected multimedia software expertise in the industry. Founded in 1998, PV is headquartered in San Diego, California with regional offices in the U.S., Japan, Europe and India.