September 20, 2007; Toronto – WHILE the grown-ups of the surging broadband business have been the life and soul of the party here this week, that wilful child the handheld IFE sector has managed to peek over the banisters and make its little piping voice heard above the merriment.

Attracting the attention of the revellers was WiseDV chief executive Atul Anandpura, who intrigued observers on the eve of the show by coming from nowhere with a terse announcement about yet another handheld start-up. What could have possessed him to enter a market replete with disappointed wannabes and at last showing signs of developing a stable supplier community? Inflight Online found out yesterday.

Formerly with e.Digital, maker of the increasingly successful eVU player, Anandpura decided in 2005 to apply his skills to an industry that moved a little faster than the sobersides of air transport. He chose professional sport and set out to provide spectators at live events with an extraordinary new perspective – video action replays and multiple views of other action going on simultaneously at the venue.

He set up a new company – San Diego-based WiseDV (Wireless Interactive Sports Entertainment – Digital Video) – to develop his product. Called Lvis (Live Viewing Systems), it combined a wireless-enabled handheld smaller than a paperback book with a powerful head-end server and Coded Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (COFDM) video transmission technology. The idea was to pipe feeds from cameras at various points in the stadium to the server and then broadcast them wirelessly from the head end to the handhelds.

In April this year he carried out a field trial with the Anaheim Ducks ice hockey team – “The fans loved it,” said Anandpura – and he ordered up a stock of 2,500 players from a South Korean contract manufacturer for his first paying event, the US Open tennis championship.

Holding units branded by US Open sponsor American Express, spectators were able to keep tabs on up to four remote matches simultaneously while watching the live action in front of them. Alternatively, they could view any match from four different camera angles. Also available at the touch of a button were player biographies and other information about the event.

American Express card-holders were offered the players free of charge in exchange for a returnable deposit. Among the takers was a Northwest Airlines flight attendant who, according to Anandpura, suggested that the offering would go down well with passengers. And so was born ALvis, an all-wireless handheld for the air transport industry.

“We took the original sports-oriented system and repurposed it for airline use,” said Anandpura. That involved creating a smaller, 160Gb, server for installation in the aircraft and setting up the handheld with a new graphical user interface to deliver audio and a total of eight video channels; no physical changes were needed. A compact battery designed by WiseDV and manufactured in China gives eight hours of playing time.

“We made a last-minute decision to debut ALvis at the show, and it has paid off in a number of encouraging meetings with airlines,” said Anandpura. “Now we’re working on things like airworthiness approval and, of course, securing agreements with studios on the supply of content.”

Asked the obvious question about anti-piracy protection, Anandpura radiated confidence. “Our system is based on streaming radio, the encoding is proprietary and the whole thing is encrypted,” he declared. “The pirates might try, but they’d need to bring a mountain of computers on to the aircraft before they could even make a start.”

WiseDV’s not the first new entrant into the handheld sector to express sunny optimism about ready access to content, and it remains to be seen if the studios buy the company’s assurances about the uncrackable nature of its wireless technology. Moreover, the FAA and other airworthiness authorities are sure to suck their teeth at the prospect of yet another set of frequencies fizzing around the cabin.

But the fact remains that this is an entirely fresh approach to portable IFE, exploiting wireless to eliminate the need to regularly load content to a hard disc in the player, which can consequently be smaller and lighter. Connoisseurs of the kaleidoscopic handheld scene have an exceptionally interesting new specimen to keep an eye on in the coming months.