Mobile World Congress News

Syniverse Technologies, which was recently acquired by the Carlyle Group, officially unveiled its Mobile Video Broadcast Service – and announced that Korea Telecom (News - Alert), the country’s largest landline telco and second-largest mobile operator, is a commercial user of the offer – this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Mobile Video Broadcast Service, which Syniverse (News - Alert) delivers on a white-label basis to wireless network operators, does all the behind-the-scenes work required to ensure end users get good quality broadcast video over whatever broadband connections they have available to whatever devices they happen to be using – and without requiring those end users to download any software to enjoy that experience.

The Syniverse service does the necessary transcoding to ensure all the equipment involved works together, adjusts video compression based on the available 3G or 4G bandwidth, and formats the video for the specific endpoints involved.

KT (News - Alert) leverages Syniverse’s Mobile Video Broadcast Service to support its Show It service, which the mobile operator launched in December. Show It allows smartphone subscribers to share live, user-generated video broadcasts with anyone who has a data-enabled mobile device or e-mail address.

Charles Landry, executive vice president of global messaging at Syniverse, says that video broadcast services are just the first example of the kind of carrier services Syniverse can help enable. The same kind of formatting, mediation and transcoding would be required to deliver widespread video calling services, he adds. In fact, Syniverse expects to introduce an offer designed and marketed for that application in the near future, he tells TMCnet.

Syniverse is a 20-year-old company that offers a variety of services involving roaming, clearinghouse, settlement and messaging. It processes 2 billion messages a day and handles something like 50,000 transactions per second.