PacketVideo Achieves Instantaneous Mobile TV Channel Changing

Improving the User Experience for Faster Adoption of Digital Video Broadcast
Consumers would not accept a six-second wait for the channel to change on their TV at home, and PacketVideo Corporation’s new enhancement to its Digital Video Broadcast – Handsets (DVB-H) solution eliminates that delay on mobile devices.

Overcoming a major obstacle in bringing mobile digital broadcast TV viewing closer to the experience of watching at home, PacketVideo today introduced an efficient solution for fast channel changing, dramatically reducing the problematic delays that have to-date accompanied the mobile broadcast TV experience. This solution is being demonstrated at the International Consumer Electronics Show, held here this week.

“The world has been watching TV for nearly 70 years, and expectations are high for the mobile viewing experience,” said PacketVideo CEO Jim Brailean, Ph.D. “At PacketVideo, we’re optimizing each element of that experience to make it better. We do this to help our mobile operator and handset manufacturer partners create a better end-user experience at the launch of digital video broadcast services.”

PacketVideo, whose heritage is rooted in bringing video to mobile devices, was the first company to enable video on a mobile phone back in 1998.

No Longer Trading Battery Life for Speed

Currently during digital video broadcasts for mobile devices, delays between channel changes are a symptom of the set-up between the number of streams per multiplex, the related time slicing, and how the streams are aligned in those time slices. Other methods to improve channel transition speed may have the undesirable side effect of draining precious battery life. The PacketVideo solution minimizes the impact on battery life while achieving a 200-300 milliseconds channel transition time in a typically configured broadcast system.