Thin Multimedia specializes in wireless multimedia streaming and video messaging. Using their services, wireless operators and handset manufacturers can develop new revenue streams that will enhance their current offerings. Their software based tools include encoding, decoding, authoring, messaging and streaming and can be deployed on existing 2G and 2.5G mobile networks. Future plans include 3G mobile networks. With the Thin multimedia application, it is unnecessary for hardware manufacturers to upgrade their phones.

To gain a better understanding of the company’s origins and offerings, I spoke with Jennifer Grant, Marketing Manager and Dale Park, COO. Jennifer said: “Chuck Yoo, our founder and CEO, is a professor at the University of Korea. The original codec that was developed was funded by Sun for a project for their network computers. Chuck developed the codec for that project, retained the intellectual rights and then decided to continue develop it for the wireless environment. Since then, he founded the company, then brought on Dale and the rest of the team in order to create an end-to-end streaming solution for the wireless environment.”

“Our first customer was SK Telecom in Korea (according to data provided by SK Telecom, they estimate that over 200,000 units were sold by January 2002). A second customer who will be launching soon, (in May), is LG Telecom, which is the number 3 operator in Korea. There are several advantages that we offer. Our product is field tested, it’s been proven in the marketplace and we have the statistics and experience to offer a solution that we’re not developing off the cuff. It works. Because of the way the technology was developed, the processing power and memory requirements on the cell phone are very low, which give us the advantage of being able to put the decoder or the video player on a wide variety of cell phones, giving us access to a much larger market.”

Nathan: What can you display?

Dale: “Most of the LCD’s are 128x128 pixels. With SK Telecom, we use a portion of that screen (112x96 pixels) and on that small screen, certain forms of content work well. Movies and wide trailers, might not be a good fit, but information about traffic, the news and animation work well. In addition, one of the most popular forms of content is where you make it yourself and send it to your friends.”

Jennifer added: “On top of the basic wireless video, we have a lot of computer applications that we’ve created to offer users different options of video streaming on the cell phone. for example, we have a video mail product, where on a web site with a webcam, you can create a little video of yourself and send it to someone’s cell phone. We have a traffic application that will pick up a live feed from a web site and then users can tap into whatever bridge or highway they want to view from their cell phone.”

“Since the screen is small, it’s important to realize that the video on a cell phone not like TV or something similar to that. It’s a different type of communication in a new category. There are some forms of content that won’t work on a cell phone, such as dark movies. But in Korea, there are other forms that are effective and popular. One of these is the video mail that I spoke of, also video greetings which are similar to the e-greetings that are on Internet web sites, that you can you can e-mail to each other, such as celebrities singing ‘Happy Birthday’ or a popular cartoon character wishing someone a Happy Anniversary.”

Nathan: Do the cell phones display black and white only, or is color available?

Jennifer: “We can do both. In Korea, they started with 4 levels of gray, but now all of their new phones are color phones. Video is what really drives the purchase and the need for color phones. Recently, we’ve found that some of the color phones are improving their screens quite significantly and the differences are amazing.”