TWli, Microsoft offer hosted video streaming services

TWI Interactive is working with Microsoft and Vidiator Technology to offer mobile phone operators a hosted method of delivering video streaming services to customers.

Although mobile phone operators are scrambling to offer video streaming services, they know that there won’t be a large revenue stream from the services for up to 18 months, TWIi’s Senior International Vice President Max Haot said Thursday.

TWIi has therefore developed the MobileVision service, which offers content management, transcoding, streaming, billing and customer care on a per-download fee basis and lets operators provide video without investing in their own in-house service, Haot said. At a later date, when the market has grown, customers will be able to take the same service in-house and simply pay a license fee for the software, he said.

Mobile operators need to get into the video streaming market, Haot said, but until now their only choices have been to be tied into an outsourced service, or to spend millions of pounds to create an in-house project.

“This way they can launch the service quickly, with their own brand, their own content,” he said, with the ability to transfer the services in-house when they are ready.

The service is available immediately, but Haot was not able to name any customers signed up to use it.

The service is primarily a technical one, designed to let operators provide their own content, but TWIi in Boston can provide content channels, such as news and entertainment video streams, if its customers want that, Haot said.

Operators will pay a start-up integration fee and then a per-download charge. “It’s not a revenue share model, it’s just a straight technical charge based on download numbers,” Haot said. He declined to specify exactly what that charge would be.

The platform will work with many phones already on the market and does not require the operator to install software on handsets as it uses 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) open source video streaming and can work with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 9 Series and other preinstalled video software, Haot said.

Microsoft will provide TWIi with Windows Media and Microsoft .Net knowledge, and its staff will help to deploy the service to operators, while Vidiator is providing the encoding, decoding, transcoding and streaming of the content.

Neither Microsoft not Vidiator were immediately available to discuss the service.