Coming Soon: Mobile Video & TV Everywhere

There’s one thing that you can be almost certain of: over the next twelve months we will be seeing ever more video, television and streaming media solutions coming out for our Treo.

For starters, it appears that Kinoma have made significant progress with their development of a streaming media client (in the picture below I am viewing a live CNN feed which I opened from a link on a web page with Blazer).  The overall quality of both the audio and video was very good but naturally the experience is closely associated to 1) the data bandwidth that you get delivered to your Treo (here it was between 30kbps and 60kbps) and 2) finding content that is encoded for low bandwidth playback.

Evidently, the best part about streaming video from the web is that it is often than completely free and I expect that many content providers will develop feeds optimized for mobile viewing.  Additionally, as EVDO, EDGE and other 3G networks become more prevalent and future versions of our Treo are able to use its higher bandwidth the quality of mobile streaming will improve significantly.

Next in line is the MediaFLO technology developed by Qualcomm (below) which is due to be launched on October 1, 2006 and which promises to deliver dozens of high quality live television and on-demand video programming to various handsets which incorporate its technology (there is no indication that Palm has yet signed up to develop a Treo with MediaFLO but I believe that we may see new models coming out in early 2007 that will).

The quality of the video is categorically amazing – you get full motion and no pixelation – and is the best demo that I have seen to date of any streaming technology.  Changing channels takes only 1.5 seconds compared to about 15 seconds with DVB-H (a competing technology) or MobiTV for example.  MediaFLO is able to deliver this enhanced experience principally because it does not rely on the carriers’ traditional data network to deliver the video feed but instead will use a network of cell towers across the US that Qualcomm is investing over $600 million to build.

Finally, there’s MobiTV again which has fast become one of the most popular new services for Treonauts.  Even though it is already a terrific solution, the company is already working on MobiTV 2.0 and I’ll update this post today or tomorrow with more information about this.

Lastly, you can also expect to see solutions such as TiVo To Go, Orb Networks and others to soon provide mobile streaming capabilities (either directly or via third parties) which hopefully we will be able to view using Kinoma’s future streaming client.

Treonauts want all their video on the go…