Vidiator is one of those names you know you’ve heard, but can’t for the life of you remember where. That’s because it’s a service which uses standard technology and sits behind other brand names. At IBC it made a bit of a claim to fame offering what it calls ‘the first world’s first mobile solution that enables live pause, time-shifting and place-shifting.’
Well we immediately pointed out that there was one on show two years ago at IBC from Texas Instruments, but that was a Flash based DVR for a broadcast DVB-H service (which for the most part has never been launched). This is for 3GPP streaming ‘ so it’s just software to store any video that you have had streamed to your handset.
Vidiator calls it the Xenon Time Shifter and there isn’t any element of place shifting, that was just an over enthusiastic PR engine. Place shifting is specifically when you watch TV in a different place from where it was sent, and you are clearly watching this on the same device it was sent to even if the device is mobile.
And again we would argue it’s not a first, but it should still be a winner for Vidiator. The company provides streaming servers and offers dynamic bit rate adaptation to all the thousands of handsets out there which can receive video of different quality at different speeds. It runs these services for Vodafone, Orange, PCCW and NTT DoCOMo and runs parts of other services at 3 Group and even contributes some of the technology used in the Ericsson streaming solution. So if this system works, it is likely to suddenly find its way into lots and lots of streaming TV services in the coming 12 to 24 months.
One of the best things about having a DVR on your mobile is that you can pause live TV, as any home DVR viewer will tell you, for example to take a call. They can even transfer the remaining stream to their PC.
Connie Wong, CEO of Vidiator commented: “With Xenon Time Shifter, the mobile TV business model finally becomes viable for service operators as the technology fits real-world usage where mobile phones are recognised as more than just TV players.”
Vidiator says that it has patented bookmarks and playlist technology but somehow we suspect that TiVo has most of the patents in DVR technology, although that’s not to say that there wouldn’t be more non-obvious work to be done to add to the basic timeshift patents. The company also added support with streaming for the iPhone, but pointed out that because it uses HTTP streaming, which is fine on a fixed line, but problematic on a mobile, it’s not as good as its own streaming services based on RTSP.
One of the reasons that other companies have not proceeded with a DVR for broadcast mobile TV, is because there is a very non-trivial task of calling for any lost IP packets over the cellular link when video packets go missing in a broadcast. This is already part and parcel of the standard for cellular streaming.