Monsoon Multimedia announced last week that its set-top TV place-shifting products will soon deliver television to Windows Mobile and Symbian handhelds, including smartphones and PDAs. New handheld applications for Windows Mobile are due this month, followed by a version for Symbian-based smartphones.
The company’s four set-top boxes already provide place-shifted viewing to Windows computers and to Nokia’s palm-top N810 Internet appliance. Like the Slingbox PRO, Monsoon’s HAVA devices support multiple video sources connected at the same time, and their high-end units can stream to multiple viewers at once on a local network, though only one at a time over a broadband connection to the Internet.
Monsoon licensed new audio and video compression decoders from On2 Technologies, Inc. in order to implement the handheld client software; handhelds pose a significant challenge for receiving decent video quality thanks to low (and often unreliable) network bandwidth and low processing power compared to home computer setups.
A beta evaluation copy of the HAVA Mobile Player for Windows Mobile (including Palm Treo smartphones based on Redmond’s OS) is available now from the company’s web site.
