Hutchison 3G gets the ball rolling

When telco Hutchison 3G won its third-generation mobile phone licence, the cornerstone of its planned service was the use of video, first for videophone calls and second for the delivery of services to handsets such as news, entertainment and, most importantly, football highlights.

To support this planned service, Hutchison 3G signed a deal with the FA Premier League in June 2001 to stream video clips with audio of goals and highlights from important Premiership matches.

The plan was simple: to move the already popular mobile phone service of sending goal alerts to videophones in the form of SMS messages with a 10-second video clip.

"Why read about a goal when you can actually see it?" asked Stephen Desmond, video content producer for Hutchison's 3 arm at BBC Technology.

One of the commercial arms of the corporation, BBC Technology is the organisation charged with preparing the football highlights for 3.

Drawing on its vast experience of broadcasting over a variety of analogue and digital platforms, as well as using technology developed in-house for the gathering and transmission of broadcast media, BBC Technology has put together a highly tuned process for turning full-screen football coverage into clips suitable for a tiny mobile phone.

The main problem with delivering video of any kind to a mobile phone is image clarity. The nature of the compression used for streaming media means that the definition of the image will suffer, and simply showing a wide-angle view of the pitch would be useless on a phone screen not much bigger than a box of matches.

As well as choosing which five segments of the match should be used, BBC Technology has the task of making any footage watchable on a tiny screen.

That means taking the image, sometimes frame by frame, and zooming in on the action, cutting out the parts of the shot where nothing is happening. As a result, the mobile viewer enjoys improved clarity.

BBC Technology also adds commentary, which is encoded into the stream to synchronise with the video. It is then transmitted to 3, which handles the final part of the distribution to users' handsets.

"While the process of gathering the material is not really different from editing a package for TV, it's what we do with the footage once we've decided on which clip to use that matters," explained Desmond.

"It's important that the 10 seconds is visually clear enough for the viewer to see what is going on, which means that once we've grabbed out 10 seconds, around a goal being scored, for example, we zoom the view in on the important action and players involved in the build-up to that goal, and not on the bigger, wider shot that would normally be shown on TV."

Desmond added that BBC Technology's experience with producing football clips lends itself to using voice and video in other environments.

"We've learned a great deal about how to get the best from mobile video, and a lot of the techniques we've perfected here could be applied to getting the best from 3G phones for video calls," he said.

But the service goes further than football. BBC Technology is producing a range of video material for 3 including news headlines from ITN, weather bulletins and comedy clips, all of which undergo the same treatment to ensure that the viewer can make out what is going on.