April 12, 2007

Explay Projects Big Business for Mobile Video

By Jim Barthold

The telecommunications industry tends to overthink everything - often overlooking the easiest answer. For instance, how many times have you heard "Who wants to watch television on a 2-inch screen?" as a reason why TV on a mobile phone won't ever happen? It's only a solid argument, though, if you concede that the picture has to be displayed on that 2-inch screen.

Explay, an Israeli company, has developed a "straightforward" solution: Use a nano-projector to enlarge and project the image.

Golan Manor, vice president of technical marketing for Explay, believes that telecom providers will adopt mobile projection, enabling cell phone users to watch videos means extra revenues.

"If you could have a larger screen to your mobile phone, there have been a lot of studies that show that people will be willing to view for longer periods of time," he said. "If you view for long periods of time, you'll also be willing to view commercials."

Ding, ding, ding. He said the magic word, and the duck fell from the ceiling. Commercials equate to advertising, and advertising means money.

The telco crowd, having a tough time figuring how to directly appeal to the appointment TV audience with a 2-inch screen, has taken the roundabout route and developed mobisodes, short three-minute or so condensations of prime-time programs - without advertisements, of course.

The TV business

A mobisode is a great teaser, but "it's not where the industry wanted to be," Manor said.

If the recent CTIA Wireless Show was any indication, the industry wants to be in the TV business, right there alongside cable and telcos and satellite, either with specially developed mobile content, reformatted TV or user-generated content for which users either pay or for which advertisers pay to get in front of the users. Television is a shared experience, however, and it's tough to share when only one squinting viewer can see what's on the screen.

Explay uses a combination of LEDs and lasers to project a crystal-clear picture up to 40 inches in diameter. Suddenly, you're not watching a mobile phone; you're watching television.

"LEDs are very inefficient; they draw too much power," said Manor. "Lasers, on the other hand, are very small, very efficient, but in some wavelengths they are either not available or still too expensive. Our architecture enables us to mix and match lasers and LEDs."

For now, Explay's offering is a matchbox-sized attachment for mobile phones that costs several hundred dollars. It will, Manor predicted, follow the normal technology curve until it becomes a part of mobile devices, much like cameras and MP3 players have been incorporated into cell phones.

"We have active working prototypes of the product, which we demonstrated to a few people at CTIA," he said. "The technology is in the final stages of commercialization with the next step of having the product ready to be launched into the market."

Getting it to market

Explay has talked to "all the leading cell phone manufacturers" about incorporating the technology into their devices, but that involves the design process, and that's a longer term effort. "We think the right way is to start with an accessory, which we'll have at the beginning of next year," he said.

It will be up to the service providers to ensure there are applications that attract viewers, er, callers, er, users.

"A lot of the services that carriers are interested in putting into the market are hard sells because of the small display of the mobile devices," Manor said. "If a projected screen means people will watch more, that means they'll be willing to pay more and justify such a device."

And that means, harking back to the previous item, that maybe NextWave is going in the right direction.

- Jim Barthold