HP, DoCoMo demo mobile streaming media

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By Joris Evers

HANOVER, Germany (IDG) -- Hewlett-Packard (HP) and NTT DoCoMo plan to show off the first results of their partnership for streaming media on next-generation mobile phones next month, an HP executive said here Tuesday.

Separately, Koninklijke Philips Electronics also announced a mobile streaming media product.

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"We have been designing and prototyping a content delivery network for streaming video over NTT DoCoMo's new mobile infrastructure and are also partnering on the development of services," said Per-Kristian Halvorsen, a director at HP Labs, in an interview here at the CeBIT trade show. Further details will be announced next month at an event in Japan, he added.

The services, which for example allow a mobile-phone user to watch video clips on a handset, are meant for 3G (third-generation) mobile networks, Halvorsen said. Tokyo-based NTT DoCoMo, Japan's leading mobile-phone company and developer of the mobile Internet service I-mode, launched its 3G service last year.

The partnership between HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., and NTT DoCoMo was first announced in late 2000. It gives the Japanese operator access to HP's streaming media encoding and decoding technology, Halvorsen said.

Meanwhile, Philips on Tuesday announced its Platform4 line of software-based media-handling products which, much like HP and NTT DoCoMo's yet-to-be-announced product, is designed to deliver multimedia over mobile networks.

The Amsterdam-based consumer-electronics company built Platform4 around standards including MPEG-4 and H.263. The platform is targeted at mobile-phone operators, who can use it for compression, delivery, playback and rendering of multimedia content, Philips said in a statement.