Most Apple inventions are specifically not inventions, and technologists working in and around the mobile digital media market, such as Packet Video, had already pictured devices like the iPhone, as part and parcel of where the market was going.
‘That’s where we saw the market heading,’ said Joel Espelien, chief business offer for Packet Video, ‘Multiple ARM processing cores, flexible user interfaces based on standards like Flash, running on Linux and using downloadable toolsets.’
Packet Video boasts on its web site that it created the first software implementation to bring video to the mobile phone, but that was 9 years ago and ever since there has been a constant expectation that the mobile content dam is about to break.
Perhaps that’s all that Apple did then, just anticipate the arrival of a variety of technologies and announce them all together, and it did it first. That makes it appear like it revolutionized the handset, but listening to Espelien, it’s been a long time coming.
The key elements that needed to be in place, according to Espelien are some standards and some downloadable toolsets, such as Flash Lite, Scalable Vector Graphics and a DRM client that can be downloaded.
‘Phones and consumer electronics are going to stop being hardware centric built in a vertically integrated model, and the change will create a market where software can thrive. We’ve been waiting a long time for this.’
Packet Video came out of the compression and signal processing business, ‘Most of the players in our market, like RealNetworks, ended up selling content, we don’t want to do that, we want to be a software company that can target the entire handset market.’
Packet Video has 300 staff, plus 60 offshore workers and is 100% owned by Nextwave Networks, a US public company that specializes in WiMAX. That tells you just what type of project that Packet Video is almost certain to be involved in, in the near future, bringing the whole digital media world cheaply to the early WiMAX handsets.
‘We concluded early on that the most interesting place is connecting devices to services using software. We see it much as the way that TiVo is different from standalone DVRs and the way iTunes and the iPod work together. These are the archetypes of this market, so we set out to make software to allow a device – services connect.’
One of the projects that Packet Video is famous for is the creation of the software stack that allowed XM Satellite Radio customers to record the music they hear over the radio. While this was a neat product, adding life to what was little more than a radio replacement business, it catapulted the client XM into a legal battle with the major record labels.
Part of the reason for the suit is the way the perceived value of the XM service went up, making the record labels think they deserved more for the provision of their music.
So what Packet Video really does is takes existing software ‘ DRM, operating systems, media players, Electronic Service Guides, and puts them all together, writing the connectors between them and making sure they work. ‘We’re always trying to move up the food chain. We start with a basic competence in moving around the bits inside embedded devices, but we do look forward to a time when portable devices are more about standard software components.’
Last week we reported from 3GSM that Packet Video had helped demonstrate the Microsoft PlayReady DRM system and couldn’t resist asking where Espelien thought this fitted in.
‘We work with virtually every DRM there is, but there are problems with most of them, the technical implementations of PlayReady and OMA are hardly stellar.
‘What the market needs is a downloadable DRM. OMA, Intertrust’s Marlin, and Microsoft PlayReady all need to be natively built into a device by the handset maker. They rely on a embedded safe keys provided by companies like Discretix and Cloakware.’
‘What we need is a different approach, where the DRM client can be downloaded.’ Give us an example, we asked, ‘Secure Digital Containers from Switzerland,’ was the answer.
In a way this represents the same change that IPTV went through. From conditional access systems that have smart cards or security chips to Private Key Infrastructure built around AES encryption in software-only, downloadable DRMs, which are refreshable and allow multiple frequent authentications to thwart device cloning.
Espelien is saying that the handset market is about to go through the same adjustment, and that it is just one of the changes which will trigger a standardized architecture on handsets.
‘A lot of handset design used to be done in assembler, then it moved to the operating system and used languages like C. But once you have dynamic tools like Flash, then what used to take people months can be done over the network. Instead of going through the processes of design, coding, burning, test and shipment you can offer a dynamic user interface which can be changed by either the carrier or by the user or both.
‘We’ve seen MP3 players where the whole interface is written in Flash, and the smaller the device, the more powerful this concept is and then this market comes to be about developers, developers and developers. And if you open up handsets with Flash, downloadable DRM and digital media, then there are far more developers who don’t need a degree in rocket science like you do for Series 60 or Brew.’
So Espelien sees low cost multi-ARM chips as the future for handsets. ‘Texas Instruments did cause us a few headaches, and it was a step backwards. The DSP processor has not really helped the mobile world, because it takes so much effort to harness its power when it is part of an applications processor. Sure it accelerates your applications, but the design takes forever.
‘Keep your eyes open at the CTIA next month. We think there will be a lot of announcements that take the cellular market in this direction with digital media handsets built around multiple low cost ARM chips, running Flash for user interfaces and relying on more and more standard downloadable software tools.’