3 Hong Kong early this month launched a premium service allowing subscribers to select and watch Web videos directly from their existing mobile handsets. The service is part of the mobile operator’s 3Xplorer 2.0 package, which subscribers can add for an extra fee on top of the company’s regular service.
Using the service, consumers can watch video on such popular Web sites as YouTube and Facebook. 3 Hong Kong, a division of Hutchison Telecommunications, developed the 3Xplorer 2.0 partially in response to the increasing popularity of such Web 2.0 sites as YouTube Hong Kong in the region, said Amy Lung, COO of mobile at Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong, in a statement.
Novarra, a provider of mobile Web gateway platforms and services, is powering most of the capabilities behind the 3Xplorer 2.0. 3 Hong Kong is using the company’s Vision Internet Platform to transfer the Web videos into mobile-compatible formats for a range of 2.5G and 3G handsets. Novarra’s Vision Media Server performs the transformation while optimizing for the specific device and media player capabilities. In addition, it dynamically adapts video encoding rates to achieve optimal quality based on available network bandwidth. Novarra also provides Java and BREW micro-clients for the service, which integrate video playback into the Web browser with a PC-like user interface.
For more information, visit www.three.com.hk and www.novarra.com.
