MUMBAI: For the first time in India, a live action event will be brought to the mobile device in near real time.

Hutchison has launched the first ever General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) based video delivery onto subscribers' mobile phones, which will commence with video action from the Cricket World Cup 2003.

 
As a result, all subscribers of Hutchison in India (Hutch and Orange networks) will be able to receive video clips within minutes of the actual action, states a release.

Till now such video clips were available only over 3G networks but Hutchison has made this breakthrough on GPRS networks as well. Nimbus Communications Ltd will look into the video production for new formats.

According to the release, Nimbus has set up a studiodedicated to downloading encrypted signals from South Africa from the PAS 10 satellite using a RAS enabled decoder. The digital feed will then be recorded onto a master server, backed up by a redundant server and a DV recorder, all in real time. Two dedicated NLE work stations will edit in real time the match action, route the over highlights in the form of 10 second video clips to four workstations which in turn will generate four different file formats of each video clip : AVI, GIF, JPEG and MPEG.

The protocol generator workstations will then route individual 10 second clips in the four different file formats over dedicated lines to the Hutchison servers in Mumbai which will then deliver these to subscribers in the appropriate file format depending on which file format their mobile handset is capable of receiving.

Recognising that handsets are not uniformly capable, the multiple file format system was devised to suit the handset capability of most Indian handsets that have any form of MMS or video capability.

Nimbus intends to offer these services to the vast mobile services market, and post Cricket World Cup intends to take these capabilities to the global GPRS market, targeting
Australia, Middle East, Europe, South East Asia, the release adds.