I understand the concern about download times and video quality, though the comparison to V Cast and Sprint TV is not a good one. All of these services do not involve creating a video player / decoder – they use the video playback capabilities that are ‘built-in’ to the device. This means hardware decoding or atleast decoder software that exists as native code in the phones firmware. Our player is purely interpretted Java because with Blackberries that is the only way you can write software.

Having said this, I understand that at the end of the day people don’t care about the reason – they just want the video to look good. We feel however, that the quality is good when you compare this to the video offered for a lot of phones by services such as mobiTV (mobiTV powers a lot of carrier branded mobile video services). they have 2 levels of quality: the ‘low frame rate’ version for many devices is only 2 frames per second (!), and the ‘high frame rate’ version (for newer or high-end phones) is 8-10 frames per second. As this service also uses ‘built in’ playback capabilities on these devices, we feel pretty darn great about the fact that we definitely are at or near their ‘high frame rate’ performance.

Another factor is the high screen resolution of the new Blackberries. The 8700 has a 320 x 240 resolution screen. That is a lot of pixels to render compared to other ‘phones’ (including other ‘smartphones’) which typically have a screen resolution of only 176 x 208 pixels.

In any event, we want this to be the best it can be and we have improvements in quality and file size coming. And yes – streaming will be coming shortly.