Cellular downloads phone wallpaper

Cartoons, computer games and full-motion movie trailers: Is this any way to sell a communications revolution?

Sony Computer Entertainment and NTT DoCoMo, the largest wireless carrier in Japan, announced plans last week to link two of their most popular products: NTT DoCoMo's i-mode Internet mobile phone service and the Sony PlayStation game console.

The first fruit of the alliance will be a package of new services, available this December, that will allow narrowband i-mode users to play games that have been optimized for the Sony PocketStation hand-held device. Details have not been finalized - nor has the business model for the venture - but users probably will be able to link their phones to the hand-held device through an adapter, download games and take them on the road.

The i-mode service and PlayStation are doing well by themselves. Shipments of the Internet-capable PlayStation2 unit have topped 3 million - and the product will not be released in the U.S. or Europe until this fall.

The NTT DoCoMo i-mode service has set a similar frantic sales pace since its introduction in spring 1999. NTT DoCoMo President Keiji Tachikawa said in July that the carrier was on track to reach 10 million subscribers by this month. NTT DoCoMo originally expected to take the entire year to hit that mark. Adding 40,000 to 50,000 new customers per day, as i-mode does now, Tachikawa predicted the total customer base could reach 17 million by the end of 2000.

But Sony's real goal is to capitalize on NTT DoCoMo's upcoming transition to a wideband-CDMA (W-CDMA) network, which is expected to occur in May. The faster 382 kb/s data rates available under W-CDMA will permit video images, better graphics and less latency.

"With broadband wireless technology, specifically NTT DoCoMo's W-CDMA, there will be the possibility of more enriched game content," SCE President Ken Kutaragi said in a press conference. "I think this unique Japanese mobile phone culture will also be welcomed overseas."

Content deals such as the Sony/NTT DoCoMo matchup suggest that adding the Internet to wireless phone service over an advanced high-bandwidth network will do much more than enhance call quality. Carriers with 3G plans in place are beginning to ask themselves what use they can make out of the additional capacity, said Barney Dewey, an analyst with The Andrew Seybold Group.

"It's not clear what [NTT DoCoMo and Sony] intend to do at this point," he said. "DoCoMo is desperately trying to figure out what applications are going to be winners when they get all this new bandwidth. They're putting the system in because they need more voice capability. But I still think they want to find out what they can do on the data side."

PacketVideo expects full-motion video to stake a claim on part of that newfound bandwidth. The company, whose investors include Sony, just signed a deal with Warner Bros. to put some of its cartoon properties into short films designed specifically for the wireless Web. The films will be linked to the Warner Bros. Online and Entertaindom Web sites.

Prior to the Warner Bros. deal, PacketVideo announced mobile streaming alliances with Web content notables such as AtomFilms, GO.com, Icebox, Launch.com, Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment and wildbrain.com.

While putting Batman and Marvin the Martian on mobile phones - even in full motion - may not sound like a revolutionary business model, PacketVideo expects the Warner brand name to hike market penetration. It would seem to be a relatively safe bet in Japan, where i-mode customers pay about 9cents per day to have different animated wallpaper put on their browsers every morning.

"We're targeting Japan and the rest of Asia as their 3G systems begin to roll out," said Jim Brailean, co-founder, president and chief technology officer of PacketVideo. "Most of them have 2.5 G now, so they have 64 kb/s available to mobile devices."

PacketVideo currently is running seven trials of mobile video with European carriers.

"You had huge auctions for spectrum in the U.K., and another's going on in Germany right now," Brailean said. "These folks have paid big bucks to get that spectrum, and they want to get services out as quickly as possible. They're really pulling on us hard for wideband services."

Content was one key to the NTT DoCoMo success story. But another key - one that is attracting growing attention from other wireless carriers - was that i-mode sidestepped the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) used by most GSM networks and commissioned the development of compact HTML (cHTML), which is, as its name implies, a stripped-down version of the same language used to write most Web pages. As such, many analysts maintain it seems more Internet-friendly than WAP, which requires different codes for every device.

It's possible that a big win by NTT DoCoMo in selling multimedia services over wireless Internet will prompt a wave of defections from WAP.

"I have a sneaking suspicion that you're going to see more [NTT] DoCoMo-type Internet solutions," said Robin Hearn, a consultant with Ovum Research. "If this takes off, and we can't get it in Europe and the U.S., sitting here with our circuit-switched networks, it could knock WAP further back."

In Hearn's view, that's blaming the protocol for infrastructure faults.

"Wireless Internet with downloads of 9.6 kb/s? No, thank you," he said. "i-mode is much more suited to data than WAP. But when the packet-based network upgrades come along, you'll see WAP able to do whatever [NTT] DoCoMo does."