Virage and PacketVideo Work on Wireless Streaming Video

In case you weren't aware of the Streaming Media West conference that took place this week in Long Beach CA, Omid was there and gives a good overview here . Aside from the expected disagreements about audio and video formats, there actually were a few interesting announcements at the conference. One that caught our eye was Virage and PacketVideo announcing that they will team up to figure out how to enable interactive streaming video delivery in wireless devices. Under the agreement, the companies will combine Virage's Video Application Platform with PacketVideo's MPEG-4 media encoding system (PVAuthor) to enable searchable multimedia to be played over wireless devices such as mobile telephones and PDAs. Remember that we said "interesting" and not "groundbreaking" or "useful." Unless they are thinking about things like video conferencing (where it would be hard to look at the little screen while you are talking into the device) watching video on a PDA or cell phone just really doesn't sound like a killer app. Maybe they're thinking about new ways of enabling advertising...