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Handheld video expert Kinoma has demonstrated Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) playback at the PalmSource Developer Conference this week in San Jose, CA. RTSP is the streaming media network protocol mandated by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) cellular phone industry consortium for delivery of streaming audio and video to mobile phones.

At the conference, Kinoma successfully showed 3GPP compliant RTSP streaming of live video to a Treo 650 smartphone over the Sprint PCS network and to a Tungsten T5 over a WiFi/802.11b connection. The demo also included streaming of pre-recorded audio and video, compressed with industry standard MPEG-4 video and AAC audio.

When Kinoma delivers an RTSP enabled version of Kinoma Player 3 EX during the second half of 2005, the company says owners of Internet-enabled Palm PDAs and smartphones will be able to play streaming audio and video content from the growing number of content providers delivering digital media via the RTSP protocol.

The RTSP edition of Kinoma Player 3 EX will be a free upgrade to current owners of the $20 application.

Real Time Streaming Protocol
Like H.323, which defines how audiovisual conferencing data across networks, the Real Time Streaming Protocol uses the Real Time Transport Protocol to format packets of multimedia content.

But whereas H.323 is designed for videoconferencing of moderately-sized groups, the Real Time Streaming Protocol is designed to efficiently broadcast audio-visual data to large groups.

(The Real Time Transport Protocol itself does not guarantee real time delivery of data, but it does provide mechanisms for the sending and receiving applications to support streaming data. Typically, the Real Time Transport Protocol runs on top of the UDP protocol, although the specification is general enough to support other transport protocols.)

The Real Time Streaming Protocol grew out of work done by Columbia University, Netscape and RealNetworks.