Luxxon Streams at the Staples Center

During Friday night’s NBA game at Los Angeles' Staples Center, a handful of VIPs and executives will get to see the entire game streamed to Compaq iPAQs. It's not being distributed over the Internet, however, just inside the arena over an 802.11b wireless LAN connection.

Will Mulhern, VP of marketing for Luxxon said that it is taking the live TV feed from the broadcast center, connecting to Luxxon's Mediator transcoder, converting it to MPEG-4, then delivering the it over the wireless LAN to the iPAQs.

Mulhern said that the bit rate of the video isn't set, and that it can be anywhere from 5 Kbps to 384Kbps, depending on the conditions of the network. He points out that Luxxon's Mediator offers real-time transcoding to adapt to whatever bandwidth is available. It can also stream into any format — Real, Windows Media, or MPEG-4.

Although this is just a technology demonstration within the Staples center, Mulhern said that the future might see stadiums offer wireless instant replays to portable devices. Tonight's game could have been delivered over the Internet, but Mulhern said that there's not much settled in the wireless world to make it a reality. "There's device chaos, format chaos and network variations," said Mulhern.

Still, Luxxon is focused on the wireless streaming market. It released its Mediator Streaming System last year, which can adapt the bit rate, frame rate, color depth, and resolution of streams in real-time.