3D Wireless Wow

US : To provide the highest quality user experience in new multimedia-enabled mobile phones, SRS Labs and PacketVideo Corporation announced that they have entered into a licensing agreement to integrate SRS Labs’ WOW™ 3D audio enhancement technology into PacketVideo Device Solutions for immediate availability to OEM customers.

SRS Labs is a world leader in home theatre, portable audio and voice technologies. PacketVideo is the world’s premiere independent provider of mobilemedia software. Mobile handsets featuring multimedia solutions by SRS Labs and PacketVideo will be capable of delivering high quality video and immersive audio.

WOW is an invaluable technology solution for audio-enabled mobile phones because it provides a dramatically wide, three-dimensional sound image with deep, rich bass over small speakers and headphones. WOW utilises patented psychoacoustic audio techniques to significantly improve the sound of polyphonic ring tones, gaming sound effects, multimedia, video and digital audio on mobile phones.

By enabling the WOW technology on their handsets, mobile phone OEMs can now deliver a spacious, natural and immersive 3D audio listening experience. To compensate for the poor bass performance inherent in small speakers and headphone drivers, WOW also includes a patented bass enhancement technology that overcomes the physical limitations of the small speakers or headphones and creates a deep, rich low-frequency performance. For the newer stereo speaker-enabled mobile phones, WOW provides the industry’s most extreme stereo width from polyphonic ring tones and digitally compressed music such as MP3, WMA and AAC formats.

“SRS Labs’ audio enhancement technologies enable the listener to perceive a three dimensional sound field from two closely-spaced small speakers or headphones, making the audio listening experience sound much more realistic and natural,” said Alan Kraemer, SRS Labs’ executive vice president of technology. “We’ve spent the past 10 years working with consumer electronics and home theatre manufacturers to ensure product designs deliver the best possible audio experience. Now, working with leading mobile handset makers and partners such as PacketVideo, we are applying these techniques to mobile devices. The improvement that our audio technologies provide to these products is very dramatic and provides significant value to wireless service providers and handset manufacturers as they roll out new multimedia services to the market.”

“Mobile handsets have to compete with many other forms of multimedia entertainment devices, so audio quality is more important than ever,” said Joel Espelien, PacketVideo vice president for strategic relationships. “Every handset has a unique combination of hardware, software and network parameters, and with SRS Labs’ world class audio technology and PacketVideo’s unsurpassed mobilemedia expertise, we can offer OEMs outsourced custom software solutions to deliver never-seen-before audio-visual quality.”

PacketVideo Device Solutions offer OEMs a suite of innovative embedded products, including pvAuthor™, pvCamcorder™, pvPlayer™, Recorder™ and pv2way™ along with outsourced embedded engineering expertise that allows handset manufacturers to quickly and cost-effectively bring products to market with customized encoding, decoding, and 2-way video conferencing capabilities.

PacketVideo Device Solutions are embedded in handsets from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Fujitsu, Siemens, NEC, Sagem, Nokia and others. Notably, Sony Ericsson engaged PacketVideo to deliver the multimedia functionality in their P800 smartphone, including video streaming, digital camera image capture and viewing, and digital audio playback that supports leading formats.

“PacketVideo’s mission is to deliver the highest quality outsourced multimedia solutions to our OEM customers,” said Dr. James Brailean, Ph.D., chief executive officer of PacketVideo. “We are delighted to work with SRS Labs because they have an unsurpassed approach to delivering high-quality audio. Our partnership combines the best in PacketVideo mobilemedia software solutions with the best in SRS audio technologies to deliver superior quality multimedia solutions to mobile handset manufacturers.”

“PacketVideo’s knowledge of handset firmware, their success as a key outsourced solution provider for leading handset OEMs, and commitment to delivering the best video and audio experience on mobile devices made it clear to us that together we can deliver important audio/video solutions to mobile phone manufacturers worldwide,” said Ted Franceschi, executive vice president of licensing and general manager for SRS Labs. “As more mobile phones and wireless service providers roll out multimedia services and features such as music playback, video streaming and even digital broadcast reception, we see a growing opportunity for our solutions to deliver the best possible audio experience to wireless subscribers.”

Demonstrations of PacketVideo Device Solutions fully integrated with SRS WOW will be shown at the CTIA Wireless IT and Mobile Entertainment show in Las Vegas on Oct. 21-23 in SRS Labs’ booth 1033-R within the M-tertainment pavilion. Commercial solutions will be available for licensing directly from PacketVideo in the first quarter of 2004.